PRAYER June 29, 2008

We pray from a place that knows there is much beauty in the world to behold.
We pray from a place that knows there is endless love that has the power to connect us all.
We pray from a place that knows that it matters what we believe.
The Angels of our Better Nature call us to notice the beauty.
The voices of our Higher Selves call us to remember love.
Let us listen to them.
There are voices that would have us judge someone else’s worth to be less because their approach is different than our own.
There are voices that would make us feel “less” because we don’t match someone else’s set of ideas.
There are voices that would focus us only on ugliness, and disconnection and tearing down.
But we know there is more love somewhere.
Let us listen to the Higher Voices.
The ones that add life to life; the ones that encourage us to come alive, and allow for everyone and everything around us to do the same.
Let us listen to those voices.

SERMON June 29, 2008

This sermon started over breakfast one morning. I sat across the table from my husband and saw a man who looked like he had something exciting to tell. “What,” I asked. Well, he had spent the morning brainstorming things he tells himself that he should or shouldn’t do/ be/think/feel. Several pages later, he felt quite light.

That’s when we sat down to breakfast.

“I should like cats!” He said. “ I always thought that I should like cat’s because my sister liked cats and not dogs.”

When we were first married 8 years ago, there was some discussion about whether we’d get a cat or a dog. He was a cat person. I was a dog person. I’d grown up with dogs. Beyond that, when I was very young, my dad developed severe asthma and cats were one of the triggers. So in a very serious way, I learned that we should not have cats and that stayed with me into adulthood.

I had to laugh at David’s revelation because sometime during our college years, my sister Mary announced that all dogs, as pets, should be big and black. She had read that somewhere and seemed to put stock in it, so I adopted the idea.

In 38 years, Mary has never had a large black dog. In 36 years, neither have I. But for some reason the idea had weight and for years I thought that if I got a dog, it should at least be big, if not dark. But that didn’t appeal to me and I wondered if something was wrong with me because of it. It’s likely that Mary forgot about this “should” shortly after our conversation, but I held onto it because it came from my wiser older sister. It’s funny how that can happen.

David and I now have two cuddly 12-pound miniature dachshunds. One is red, and one has white, brown, and black spots. Getting them was his idea, and I happily obliged.

My dad now lives happily in the same house as a cat. His allergies are under control.

Each one of us let go of a “should” and we are all happy for it.

The funny thing about “shoulds” is that they often originate as an appropriate response to a specific situation. And then they turn into absolutes inside of us so even when a situation changes, the “should” stays. It may or may not be relevant or even helpful anymore. And it can hold us back from some really great experiences.

My resistance to cats well beyond the years I lived with someone who was allergic (and apparently beyond the years they were detrimental to his health) to them is a light-hearted example.

There is a story about a woman who always cut the front and back ends off of a ham before putting it into the oven to bake. Her husband asked her one day why she always did that. She didn’t know precisely, but that’s how her mom had always done it so it must be the way to cook a ham. She called her mom to find out why. Her mother laughed and explained that her baking pan was too small to fit the entire ham so she had to make it fit somehow.

The behavior was a relevant response to having a small pan. It wasn’t so relevant in the daughter’s life. And she had thrown away a lot until she examined the “should.”

From the time we’re born we take in messages. Messages about how we should behave, what we should like, how we should act, who we should be, and how to apply these standards to other people or situations. These “shoulds” affect our lives and they affect our souls, often in profound ways.

What might our lives be like if we consciously examined our “shoulds”; if we figured out where they came from, who they belong to, and whether or not they are helpful in our lives now; if we looked at what choices are presented to us by our “shoulds”, and what choices are denied.

What might our lives look like?

That’s what I’d like to consider this morning.

So dogs and cats were the lighter side of the breakfast conversation that David and I had one morning. It turns out that I needed to give the church a sermon topic that day and now I had one.

Of course the next thing to do was to have a party. I invited my girlfriends over for good food and drink and thoughts.

Only some of the time did we directly talk about “shoulds.”

But we talked about them all night.

We told stories about growing up. We talked about motherhood a lot – either about our own mothers or the newness of being a mother that many of my friends are now experiencing.

We gathered to talk about “shoulds” … and talked about motherhood.

Interesting.

I don’t think that is a coincidence.

As girls, we often try to emulate our mothers, or be the opposite. Either way, we define ourselves by them for at least a while. Then we become the age our mothers were when we first tried to emulate them, maybe we become mothers ourselves, and we try to figure out what womanhood means in light of her. There is bound to be a lot of “shoulds” there.

The same could be said of a man’s experience.

It is from our parents that we learned that we shouldn’t run out into the street, or touch a hot stovetop, or pull the ears of a dog. It is from our parents that we learn we should say “please” and “thank you,” brush our teeth, and get a good night’s sleep.

And things much more profound.

Things like self-respect, or shame. Things like self-care, or denial. Things like trust, or fear.

And so on.

We learn these things from countless other places too. But they start at home.

The “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that we learn build the essential framework for the codes we live by. I don’t think our experience of life can be separated from these codes, or even (should) be. After all, it’s these codes that make groups of people able to function together. They give us identity. They give is direction. They keep us safe.

But they can also do the opposite. And then they’re detrimental.

And then, of course, there are the “shoulds” that start out as appropriate responses to a certain situation, and stay with us long after the situation has changed and the should is no longer helpful.

So much of what we believe we should or shouldn’t do comes from layers of indirect conditioning. Then we are compelled to live by a code that we’re not fully conscious of or can’t really articulate. We just know somewhere deep in our fibers certain do’s and don’ts.

We tend to assume others live by the same do’s and don’ts

And we get surprised when we discover that they don’t.

And we even get offended when someone doesn’t live up to our unspoken ideas about what should and should not be.

Then we set ourselves up for a lot of struggle and a lot of trouble and a lot of missing out on neat things.

Examining our “shoulds” – and choosing our “shoulds” – is a helpful thing to do.

There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at a time.” How far can you go before there’s nothing of You left?

I think it’s also true that we can chip away at another person one inch at a time. How much can we chip before there’s nothing of that person left?

I think so much of what allows us to give ourselves away one inch at a time is to believe that another person’s “shoulds” are more legitimate for our own lives than what our own soul tells us.

And I think so much of what allows us to chip away at someone else is the belief that our own set of “shoulds” is more valid than his or hers.

Jim Hightower spoke here about a month ago and he quoted someone – I can’t remember whom, and I may not even accurately remember the quote, but it went something like, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

That’s a little hard to do without consciously examining what should messages we live by, who they really belong to, and then choosing the ones that work for us now.

We formulate our “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” one inch at a time, too. And we rarely notice.

But it’s helpful to notice.

It is helpful to notice because then we can actually decide which ones add life to life; which ones make us come alive; and which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves.

This has everything to do with the soul. It’s really no different than examining and consciously choosing one’s religion – both are about what we fundamentally believe, and how we intend to live, and what we want to pass on.

Becoming conscious of the “shoulds” we live by allows us to discern which ones belong to the voice of our Better Nature, our Higher Selves, or something more squashing.

How many people choose a profession, or a partner, or make other major life choices that kill their spirit a bit more each day because of an adopted should?

And then how many other people suffer because of that person’s frustration?

Becoming conscious of our “shoulds” is not about navel-gazing. It is about coming alive.

It is an essential part of being able to find the path that makes us come alive, because we can only do it if we shed someone else’s idea for us.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”?

A few stories came to mind as I was thinking about this theme.

One is a story about Gandhi. It may be true, it may be legend, it may be a bit of both. But it’s good…

A woman came to Gandhi and asked him to please tell her son to stop eating sugar. It was ruining his teeth and hurting his health. Gandhi thought about this for a minute, then asked her to come back in a week.

A week later she returned and made the same request, and Gandhi thought again, and again asked her to come back in a week.

This happened a couple more times before Gandhi finally advised the son to stop eating sugar.

The mother was both relieved and exasperated. If that’s all Gandhi was going to do, why did he make her wait so long and come back so many times?!

Well, he had to successfully stop eating sugar himself first, and it was much harder to do than he had expected.

There is a “should” in that story. A big one – and it’s not about sugar. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh…yesss.” The “should” has something to do with integrity – and the Angels of our Better Nature recognize a kindred voice here.

There is another story about Lance Armstrong in the 2001 Tour de France. Lance and his strongest competitor, Jan Ullrich, were neck and neck. Then Ullrich crashed. Armstrong pulled over and waited until his rival could return to the race. He said that he couldn’t imagine taking advantage of the situation.

There is a “should” in that story. A big one. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh…wow.” The “should” has something to do with humanity, or respect – and our Higher Selves recognize a kindred voice.

So please don’t hear me saying that “shoulds” are bad and we need to throw them out the window. They can be very life giving. They are even necessary for life. It’s just helpful to think about the ones we’ve got and the ones we want, and how that affects our lives and those around us.

I’ve been reading a book by Renee Peterson Trudeau called The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. I’m not a mother, but my neighbor, who is a new mother, discovered it and invited a group of friends – new mothers and non-mothers alike – to join her in reading a chapter a month and then getting together to discuss it.

Last month’s chapter observed a “should” that is alive and well in our culture – the “should” that says we must be strong and independent and not need to ask for help if we’re going to be worth much. The author observed how demoralizing this can be, especially when one is trying to figure out how to be a new parent while keeping the rest of life functioning.

Then she shared the story of a woman whose husband travels often for work. When he goes out of town for a week or more, Sarah, mom of two toddlers, has her sister babysit one night so that she can go out to dinner with a girlfriend. She also has a high-school neighbor come over a few evenings to help with dinner, baths and bedtime, and she makes sure she has easy-to-prepare food going into the week. Sarah says, “I used to dread these business trips and would want to dump the kids on my husband the minute he returned from his trip. Now I have learned that I just have to build in extras support when he’s away on a trip. Not only is the week more peaceful and enjoyable, but my husband returns to a family that’s happy to see him. Rather than being resentful that he’s been gone.”

She examined a should – the one that told her she should be independent and able to take care of everything in her life herself. She challenged it and found a way to invite others in. What she came up with has added life to her life, and to the lives of the ones she loves the most.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”? And then found the courage to choose a better path?

Here’s a different kind of story. One with weighty consequences.

I knew a woman when I lived in Chicago who had a very strong Christian faith. Her particular understanding of the faith was that, when someone dies, one should celebrate and only be glad because that person was now experiencing the ultimate eternal life. This is not every Christian’s understanding of an appropriate response to death by a long shot, but it was hers, and she is not alone in it.

Penny was very close with her mother, and during the last years of her mother’s life, her mother lived with Penny. One of the things that brought mother and daughter together so strongly was their shared faith. Her mom told Penny that when she, the mother, died, Penny should not feel sad. She should only feel happiness and rejoice that her mother was in heaven.

Her mother probably meant these words to be comfort.

And Penny expected to only feel happiness and rejoicing.

But that’s not how she felt when her mother died. Penny felt the awful aching hole that gets wrenched in us when someone we dearly love dies.

And it scared her.

It made her feel very ashamed.

Grief naturally brings crisis of it’s own. Penny’s was layered with a confusion and self-doubt that made her feel worthless, and it was all because of a “should.”

What kind of faith did she actually have if she felt sadness at the loss of her mother, instead of joy? Did it mean that she didn’t believe strongly enough? Would God reject her because of her unfaithfulness? Could she show her grief and still be acceptable to other people? How selfish must she be to feel pain for her own loss, and not exuberance at her mother’s gain? Did she not love her mother enough to be happy for her? And her list went on.

Her beliefs about what she should feel and “shouldn’t” feel, how she should and “shouldn’t” respond were so ingrained in her that when she was confronted by her actual experience, her “shoulds” shredded her.

It’s helpful to take notice of what should and “shouldn’t” messages we live by. It’s helpful to ask ourselves whose voice they belong to. Is it a voice that builds up, or beats down?

Only when we ask ourselves these questions can we actually decide which “should” messages add life to life; which ones make us come alive; which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves and present with others. And which ones would be better given back to their source.

We would choose to keep many “shoulds,” but now they would belong to our own voice and that kind of should feels very different. We would choose to let go of other “shoulds” and while that wouldn’t always be easy or pain-free, it would ultimately feel good and be a step toward gaining our own lives back.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”?

A couple of weeks after my party, I sat with one my friends on her front porch well into the night.

At the party, she seemed to redirect the topic anytime a “should” came up. “I figured out why I didn’t want to talk about “shoulds”,” she announced. “I feel so bad anytime I think of them. They’re just a weight hanging over my head or a finger waiving at me. I think of all the things I’m not getting to, or the person I’m not being with my son or my husband or at work, and I feel overwhelmed and like I’m falling short. And I feel stuck.”

Exactly.

She shared that she was trying something new. Anytime she thought she should be doing something, she changed the “should” to a “could” to see how that felt. It always felt freeing. It gave her choices.

This has everything to do with the soul. Not just our own souls, but those around us. We give ourselves away one inch at a time. We chip away at another’s soul one inch at a time. We also affect people around us by the well-being of our own soul.

I don’t think it’s accidental that all religions end up with a list of them. We recognize that there are certain codes that make life meaningful and full and larger than our own meiopic world and these codes deserve the qualification of “holy”

As we spoke together in this morning’s reading:
“It matters what we believe.

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Others are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.”

It matters what we believe. And our “shoulds” have everything to do with that.

In January of this year I was astounded to hear that on this planet, a human language dies every fourteen days.  The radio program I was listening to said that “by the end of this century, half of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages will be extinct.”[1]  One of those languages that died this year was that of the Alaskan Eyak tribe.  But, before she herself died, this language’s last fluent speaker did what she could to make sure the legacy, culture, and memory of her language lived on.  Before the time of her death at age 89, Chief Marie Smith Jones worked with researchers in putting together both a dictionary and formalized grammar of her Eyak language. Here, something of her story will live on.[2]

 

Another dying language, however, will face a different set of challenges. Here’s a brief quote from NPR’s Morning Edition from November of last year:

 

“Two brothers in southern Mexico had a falling out. They aren’t speaking, and that has linguists worried. It might have remained a family feud but the brothers are the last two speakers of the local Zoque language. Experts at the Mexican Institute for Indigenous Languages fear that the version of Zoque the brothers speak will disappear if they don’t come to terms. No details on exactly what drove the two apart.”[3]

 

Now, while the English I’m using right now is certainly in no immediate danger of extinction, I can’t help but think that all of us are in a situation similar to that of the people I just mentioned.  Each of our communities, and each of us as individuals, has such a unique experience of the world.  And, unless we express what we want now, much of it will pass with us. How is it that we translate the language of our life into something that will carry on?

 

When I was in seminary, I commonly heard from fellow students and ministers the notion that every preacher actually only has one sermon that they give over and over again in different forms.  This is not to say that the minister only has one good sermon in them, but that for many people, their ministry is driven by a religious motivation so strong, that most of their sermons and material are really variations on that larger theme.  I’ll leave it to you to decide if this description fits for your current minister, but I know that it is definitely accurate for me.

 

One night, some members of my ministerial support and study group were sitting around a table discussing what our one sermon might be.  My good friend, Julia, offered hers, and I will never forget it. Julia said that the one theme that runs through all her preaching is this: “Life is weirder, harder, and better than you think.” So far in my life, I’ve found her to be correct.

When I came to my own, it was no surprise to me that as someone with a theatre degree, mine would reflect the title of a musical: “I love you, you’re perfect, now change.”  I find that this theme runs through much of my ministry and is grounded in our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors passed down to us the theological notions that every part of creation, every individual participates in what is sacred, but that it is still hard work fashioning a fulfilling spiritual life and making justice in this world.

 

It is certainly not possible to describe an entire life in one sentence.  I have to be honest with you.  When preparing for this first sermon of the summer as your Summer Minister, I had a bit of writers’ block. This question kept creeping up on me: “What can I say to this place?  What is it that I have to offer to this historic, vibrant, and growing community of faith?”  I certainly don’t think I could offer any sort of grand wisdom that many or all of you don’t already have. But what I can do is ask you the same questions I was asking myself.

 

Why does this place exist? If this church were to disappear tomorrow, what language would disappear with it?  For each person here today, what is it that your life says to the world, and what do you want it to say?

 

We are living in a period of time where advertisers are constantly telling us to express ourselves.  But they want that expression in our cell phone plans or MySpace pages, with the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, or the music we listen to.  I was lucky enough to be invited to sit in with the Young Adult group that met here this week.  And, as they wisely said in our conversations, being sold something all the time is not the fullest expression of who we are as human beings.  Our religious tradition affirms that the great story, the religious wisdom of the world is not complete without your life.  What is it that you want it to say?

 

I know that, for me, it’s often really hard to find that answer or to say it when I have even some idea.  As romantic as I’d like to present it, I don’t spend the majority of my waking hours thinking profound thoughts or acting like some sort of saint.  A great deal of the time, I’m worried that I won’t be able to make a difference in this world as just one person, especially THIS person. 

 

I can only speak for myself, of course, but there is so much that keeps me from offering my true self to the world.  In this culture, I often feel like I’m just too busy to offer some saving message.  I’ve got a job, bills to pay, family to deal with, a house to clean – there’s just no time for some sort of prophetic message to the world.

 

I wonder if anyone else here has ever felt like it’s a little embarrassing to seem hopeful in this society?  It seems easier to get up in front of strangers, or even my family and friends, to talk about some pain in my past, stories of doom and gloom to come.  It seems like it’s easier to get up and show off some scar from when I got hurt than to speak of my real love and hope for this world.

 

The good news here is that we certainly are not the first people to feel this way or struggle with these types of issues.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes gives voice to the real frustration we can experience in this life.  The first sentence of the book begins like this, “Everything is meaningless,” says the teacher, “completely meaningless.”[4]  The more traditional translation makes me think he could have been living in 2008: “Vanity of Vanities,” he says, “All is vanity.”[5] I say, “He,” because as a court author of the time, the author was most probably male. 

 

“What is the use of all this,” he asks.  He looks to gaining wealth, power, and wisdom, and finds that each of us in the end shares the same fate.  He finds that the sunshine and rain fall upon the just and the wicked equally.  In one of the passages where he is perhaps struggling most, the author writes, “History merely repeats itself.  It has all been done before.  Nothing under the sun is truly new…We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now.”[6]

 

I can tell you that I have definitely been frustrated enough to feel like this.  Anybody else?

 

In the midst of all this, though, I’m happy to know that what we do and say actually does make a difference.  When our congregations came together to adopt the principles of Unitarian Universalism, we included this, that we affirm an “interdependent web of existence, of which we are all a part.”[7] A little wordy and vague, I know, but in my understanding, this is meant to be a statement about the nature of reality -that each and every part of existence affects and is related to all others.  Our religious tradition, and what we are learning from science, affirms that the language of our life, what we offer to this world, makes a difference far beyond ourselves.

 

In his book, Thank God for Evolution, the Rev. Michael Dowd notes that in the evolution of species, we know that one animal looks and acts the way it does because of what its ancestors did.  A Rhinoceros is thick skinned and horned because its ancient ancestors chose to stay and fight.  A gazelle is fast because its ancestors were able to flee.  What will our descendents look like?  What will the future of this church and this faith, of this world, look like because you were here? 

 

For me, another piece of good news here is that, in my experience, to make the right kind of difference, we do not have to be anything but who we are.  But the challenge is that we do have to be who we REALLY are - our most authentic selves.  Our message to the world, what each and every one of us has to give, does not have to be the smartest, most unique, interesting thing to come about.  In fact, that is not always what is most helpful.  It seems that what really matters is presenting ourselves, not the selves that get bought or sold into an image, but our REAL selves to the world in a way that alters lives.

The former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, knew something about this when he addressed the graduates of Harvard Divinity School in 1838 and talked about bad preaching.  I know that is a dangerous subject to bring up while in the pulpit, but I think it is worth it here. In this address, Emerson asserts that we have the option between choosing to give freely to the world our real selves or something far different.  Here is a bit of what he said to the graduates that day:

 

…I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more… A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral… He had lived in vain…If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it…This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all…The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought…It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor.[8]

 

What Emerson taught that day is not just a lesson for preachers, I think, but for anyone who wants their life to matter. We don’t have to present some perfect version of ourselves to the world in order to make a difference.  What we give to each other doesn’t have to be, and cannot be flawless, but it does have to be real.  When people read the story that your life gives to the world, what do they find?  Will they know that you lived, smiled and suffered, “ploughed and planted” as Emerson said?

 

It is not always easy to feel like we’re in the right part of our lives to give something to the world.  Some in this community are moving out of home for the first time, trying out new ways of living that feel right for them.  Many of us are just trying to get the basics of life in order: making a living, starting a family, or finding some type of work that gives us meaning while paying the bills.  Many people in this community are facing extraordinary or terrifying things, sometimes all at the same time.  In this room right now, there is inspiration, loneliness, sickness and suffering, ageing and youth, anxiety and hope all living side by side.  Sometimes, it is hard to believe that what is happening here in our lives could be holy, and other times it’s obvious. 

 

I am proud to be a part of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Our living tradition has held for hundreds of years that new truth about reality has been revealing itself in many ways for eons in the past, and is doing that same thing right now.  Religious inspiration and revelation about the nature of this world, of our very existence, is happening right now, right here in this room, in me, and in you.

 

It is easy to be humbled in the face of how big the world is.  And, sometimes, it’s easy also to be humiliated by it. I feel compelled to say this in almost every sermon I give, because it’s often so difficult for me to truly comprehend myself.  We are so much more than our jobs.  We are so much more than where we went to school, how we dress, where we live, or who we voted for.  These things surely affect us, and much of it is so important to us, but in the end, we are so much more than all these.  In the midst of all this mental chatter, in all these messages that are sent to us in society, how is it that I even find part of a bigger self to identify with?

 

Recently, I read a passage from scientists Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams that offer one source:

 

“…I can trace my lineage back fourteen billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system – my solar system…Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me.  Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me.”[9]          

 

It’s a good thing that we don’t have to believe this, because we know it’s true.  Looks like each of us can speak from a very spectacular place.

 

As I said in beginning this morning, over the course of the summer, I know that I have much more to learn from your community than to teach it.  But I will begin with at least with these questions.  What it is that this place gives to the world?  What is it that you want your life to say, and what is it saying?  At a White House Conference on aging 1961, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “There is no human being who does carry a treasure in [their] soul: a moment of insight, a memory of love, a dream of excellence, a call to worship.”[10]  What is yours?

 

My spiritual friends, each of us has the chance (and a very brief one at that) to let our lives speak something true to the world.  It may be something grand, something beautiful, a call to justice, a subtle compassion, or a quiet wisdom.  No matter what, know this, even in our silence, our very existence will present a message.  The interesting this about being a free religious community is that we do not have one book, authority figure, or set of rituals that will continue after us all by itself.  The future of this place and its saving message is up to us. 

 

I am sure you have noticed, but a lot of the world is in trouble right now.  So many are suffering.  So many here are suffering. We do not have the privilege of letting our lives remain silent, or say anything less than prophetic to the world.  In this community, our lives must speak to the deepest growth and potential of existence itself.

 

The term gospel means “good news.”  But I have to tell you, I am convinced that good news will not be enough.  Your life, and the life of this community, needs to show the world some great news: The great news that the potential for what we can say and be in this world is amazing.  The great news that there is always more love, more joy, more truth to be found in this world.  The great news that there are no saved and damned, none excluded from the sacred.  The great news that gay or straight, conservative or liberal, any race, creed, or nation - each of us shares in one humanity and one fate.

 

However, I believe that the call to action in a Unitarian Universalist community and in those of other religious liberals is not an easy one.  This is not some sentimental view of our role here – not just some religion where we can say “we’re all ok as we are so we have no work to do.”  This is a call to the most radical reimagining of society we have ever seen, where we each cultivate a radically free mind and heart.  Its starts this very moment.  In how we greet those who come into the doors of this church as if they were in our own home.  It starts in how generous we can be to this living tradition and to our communities.  It starts in seeing the history, the essence of being itself, something sacred in every single human, including those who differ with us (especially in this election year). 

 

The call of our community is one to give genuinely of yourself to the world – all of you, the real you – to give forth our life “passed through the fire of thought.”  This does not have to be the “you” defined your religious group, political party, or any other single label we use to confine ourselves.  This might be the simplest and most challenging thing any of us could do, but I believe this is exactly what is going to have to happen if we want to see the beloved community on earth.

 

Just like the languages dying of every fourteen days, something of our lives’ song will go with us unless we give what we can right now.   May we at this very moment find the courage to give voice to our hope; may we breathe our most authentic selves into this world, and may the language of our lives, sing songs of justice. What better time than now?

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRAYER:

            Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us work to complete it.  Life comes to us in kit form, with some assembly required.  But most of the pieces are blessed indeed – far more than are not. 

            Let us never doubt that we are a gift to this world, and let us pray that our world will be a blessing to us as well.

            So much is uncertain in life: how long we will live, how well we will live, the balance of our happy and our sad days, how we will love and be loved.  So much is uncertain. 

            But all the uncertainties take place within the larger miracle of life itself.  The miracle and the gift is the fact that we are here at all.  Let us not become so confused or jaded that we let ourselves become numb to that most important of facts. 

            If the only prayer we ever uttered was simply “Thank you,” it would be sufficient.  Thank you to Life, the universe, God, the unnameable mystery by whatever names we call it forth.  Thank you.

            Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us show our gratitude by becoming a gift to ourselves, and to others.  For we are not only gifts, but the bearers of gifts, and the world would not be as complete without us.  So let us, above all else, remember to give thanks for the sheer gift of just being alive.  Just being alive.

            Amen.

 

SERMON:   Brokenness

            I’ve never preached on “brokenness” before.  When I Googled it, I found it is a very popular word among many Christian writers.  I love good and insightful thinking from all religious traditions, but the things I read on this word “brokenness” have an odd, even morbid, undertone.  Let me read you the comments of six different authors who were among the first dozen or so to come up on the Google search, and you’ll see what I mean:

 

            One says, “An unbroken person cannot be trusted.” (Gary Rosberg)

            Reknowned Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote (in his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son) that “it is often difficult to believe that there is much to think, speak or write about other than brokenness”.

            Another author (Mark Buchanan) wrote that brokenness “molds our character closer to the character of God than anything else. To experience defeat, disappointment, loss—the raw ingredients of brokenness—moves us closer to being like God than victory and gain and fulfillment ever can.”  This sounds like some of the teaching of 12-step programs, and it’s true that sometimes we have to hit the bottom before we’re willing to wake up.  But as a model for living our lives?  We can do better. 

            Another (Alan Redpath) says, God will only plant the seed of his life “where the conviction of His Spirit has brought brokenness.” 

            A fifth author (Charles Brent) says that every call to Christ is a call to suffering, and every call to suffering is a call to Christ.

            And a sixth says that “Worship starts with a broken heart.” (Calvin Miller)

            I want to say that these voices are coming from another world, but not the one most of us are living in or would want to live in.  They are speaking from within only one vehicle of insight and wholeness, the vehicle of one popular version of modern Christianity, and I want to suggest that what’s broken is not us, but that vehicle.  I want to bring in a couple evangelical writers who speak to that, and then offer you some wisdom from a very different, perhaps unexpected, source. 

            A couple weeks ago, I talked about a new book by Christine Wicker called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.  She was raised in the evangelical Baptist church, came to Jesus at age nine, then grew away from the church, but kept a soft and warm spot in her heart for it.  A major publisher asked her to write a book about what great successes the megachurches were as the spearheads of the evangelical movement.  But after more than a year of research, the leaders within the churches convinced her that she was writing the wrong book.  She went back to her publisher and took another year to write, instead, about the unreported fact that evangelical churches and numbers are declining, have not kept up with population growth for the past hundred years, and that we’ve been duped into thinking they were strong because they learned to manipulate the media very cleverly.  They represent perhaps 7% of Americans, not the 25% we’ve been told – and the churches know this.  She includes herself among the duped, as she was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years. 

            The reason for the decline is the same as the reason for the decline of almost all traditional churches: our world has changed, our minds and hearts have changed, we no longer need the kind of God traditional religion has to offer, and we need other important things that it can’t offer.  If you think about it, that’s a revolutionary statement.  On Father’s Day, this stands out to me more, because this sounds like the data that say far more women attend church than men, because men want more hard-nosed empirical stuff than all the airy-fairy poetry of religions.  I don’t think it’s quite that simple, though there’s something to it.  But I think it is more about parents than just fathers. 

            In the world today, we need to be able to act, to adapt quickly, to think on our own, rather than blindly following authority.  We feel a visceral imperative to be more open and flexible than humans have been in the past, which is another reason we may see the blind obedience taught by evangelical parents as dangerous thinking that will not prepare their children to live in the real world after they leave home (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 171). 

            It’s in families, raising children, where the real world and the world of religious dogma are most incompatible.  Evangelical children, says Christine, are learning to obey authority while other American children are learning to question authority, to voice strong disagreement, to follow their own ideas.  While evangelical parents may protect their children from growing up too fast, other American parents – both fathers and mothers – begin preparing their children to make decisions at earlier ages.  These deep-seated differences in what parents believe their children must have and in how children are being formed as a result are the greatest reasons Americans will never, and cannot ever, return to the old-time religion. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 173)

            The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful, broken creatures in need of outside salvation.  What was once called sin is now considered sickness.  So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal. And I want to say, that’s a good thing. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 185)

            It seems that a new way of judging what’s moral and what’s not is coming into being.  It means people don’t feel the same need for the kind of God traditional religion supplies.   (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

            This kind of thinking makes our children flexible, thinking, reasoning, searching, very unorthodox people. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

            It leads to deeper, more aware, honest, nuanced and integrated kids.  This state of hopeful wholeness was once called “salvation,” but today we call it health.  So one point is that traditional religion has lost its roots in, and lost the ability to prepare us for, the real world outside the walls of the church and many fathers and mothers don’t trust their kids to it. 

            Let’s hear from one more evangelical who’s writing from inside that faith, rather than having left it as Christine Wicker did.  Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College , and wrote this for the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago. (“Too Much Faith in Faith”, 6 June 2008, p. W11).  Here’s some of what he wrote:

 

            “If there is one agreed-upon point in the current war of words about religion, it is that religion is a very powerful force.  Is it, though? I have my doubts, and they begin with personal experience. I am by most measures a pretty deeply committed Christian. I am quite active in my church; I teach at a Christian college; I have written extensively in support of Christian ideas and belief. Yet when I ask myself how much of what I do and think is driven by my religious beliefs, the honest answer is “not so much.” The books I read, the food I eat, the music I listen to, my hobbies and interests, the thoughts that occupy my mind throughout the greater part of every day — these are, if truth be told, far less indebted to my Christianity than to my status as a middle-aged, middle-class American man.

            “When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they’re not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.”

 

            Now this man isn’t a Christ-hating savage.  He teaches at Wheaton College in Illinois , the alma mater of Billy Graham, which has never been known as a bastion of liberal thought. 

            So one former evangelical author says the membership in the churches is declining, that they can’t convert enough new people to keep from shrinking because they’re too out of touch with the world we’re really living in.  And a current professor at evangelical Wheaton College says that even within the religion, the truth is that the religion has very little to do with what we think, read, feel or do.  This is a measure of a religion that has become a broken vehicle for helping us find more meaning and purpose in life.  Its wheels have come off. 

            So I began with the idea of brokenness, which is a concept deeply embedded in a lot of modern religious thinking in our culture.  I shared some of the research by a former evangelical who now, as an outsider to that worldview, reports that even the churches know they are losing more members and more appeal every year.  She suggests it’s because their message is grounded in biases that have lost their roots in the world we’re really living in, and a growing number of us prefer the real world.  Then Alan Jacobs, who is not only still an evangelical, but teaches at one of the flagship conservative colleges, says that even as a believer, he has to admit that his religious beliefs actually play almost no role in how he thinks, feels, or lives.  I think there’s good evidence that many of the loudest religious voices telling us we’re broken and need their special salvation are, in fact, themselves broken, and failing as useful vehicles for our most important hopes, fears, dreams and yearnings. 

            So what if, instead, we were to seek out some wise figures who live in the real world, are at home in it, and are also asking questions about life, meaning and purpose?  How different would their advice sound than these messages insisting that God only cares for broken souls? 

            Well, it just so happens that we have some of these voices among us.  So I want to read you a few things from their wisdom, so you can hear and feel the difference.  Remember, the question guiding us this morning is the question of brokenness: are we broken, is brokenness really a healthy and useful way of looking at our lives, or is there a way of understanding ourselves that is not broken, and is better for us?  Some of you have already heard these voices, because they are four of our own high school students, who presented short homilies during their Youth Service last Sunday.  If you missed it, you missed something very special.  Listen to a few insights from four teen-agers who live in the modern world, are creatures of that world, and believe what they’ve learned in this church – and I hope could learn in any good liberal church – that their questions and feelings matter, that they can trust their minds, and can find their own healthy and whole path through life if they choose to. 

            Now as you listen, don’t mentally patronize these young people.  Don’t think “Oh, that’s so good for a kid, it’s just swell.”  Don’t mentally pat them on the heads.  Be tough.  Listen to them as you would listen to anyone offering wisdom, and see how it stacks up.  See, especially, how it stacks up against advice about how we’re broken or sinful.  They didn’t come here to show off; they came here to try and offer something that might be both true and useful for you, so hold them to the high standards they’ve requested.

 

            Josh is one of our students, and says, “As our lives change, we lose and discover things about ourselves. We change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be.  Sometimes we also find friendships we thought we could never have, without even trying.  In my short 16 years I have moved a total of 10 times and every time I seem to find these wonderful and amazing people without even looking.  They seem to pop out of nowhere and change my life.  That I think is the greatest thing anyone could find: the love and joy of friends.”  He doesn’t sound broken. 

            Listen to the trust here.  He has found a way to back off and see life as a moving picture.  He isn’t trying to cling to a dogmatic truth, he knows already that life is about change.  He isn’t looking for water wings, but for swimming lessons, and he’s swimming pretty well. 

            One youth reflected on a Rolling Stones song from her parents’ generation, about how  “You can’t always get what you want…but if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.” She says, “No matter how much we want something or how much we think we must have something, or how hard we try to get it, sometimes the universe just won’t let it happen. But, if you try sometimes, if you try new things and expand your world, you can get what you need,” even if you hadn’t known you needed it. 

            She told a story to illustrate this, about a time she was digging through the family couch, looking for loose change to buy candy at the movie.  I imagine nearly everyone here remembers doing that.  She didn’t find enough change to get the candy, but she did find something without which many teenagers might not be able to survive for even one day – her cell phone.  She didn’t even know she’d lost it.  And so the world, she said, is like a big couch, “littered with all sorts of random objects, and waiting for us to dig around in it. Maybe we will find what we want. Maybe we will find what we haven’t been looking for, but need more than we thought.  Nevertheless, the choice is ours whether or not to look in the first place.”  And she thinks we should be out there digging around in the couch of life.  She doesn’t sound broken.

            Our third student, Shane, thought about the whole idea of gaining experiences.  He said that unless you live under a rock, you’re experiencing things every day. And that even if you do live under a rock, you’re probably experiencing things too, like pain and boredom.  But it’s not like you can go to the movie store and pick out which experiences you want, and skip the bad ones. If you want to have really valuable experiences, you have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant.  And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where you expect.  Does this sound like a modern teenager, or an ancient sage?

 

 

 

            Then Sierra talked about happiness.  She’s already learned that you can’t buy it – even with money from the couch.  “You have to know where to find it. And this is the tricky part.  How can we get it? You can try as hard as you possibly can to reach this happiness, and still not get it. You can’t control it. You can alter your mood and surround yourselves with things that supposedly ‘make you happy’, and some days the happiness just won’t come.”

            She decides that maybe happiness is more complex than we think. Maybe it has to include the sadness, the fear, the satisfaction, the contentment, the surprise, and the regrets. Like Natalie, she invents an analogy for us.  She says maybe happiness is like white light. White light is made up of all the colors, and if one color were missing, it wouldn’t be pure white, just like if one of our experiences was missing or an emotion was suppressed for a lifetime, it wouldn’t be as full, as complete a life.  It isn’t about pretending we can only have happy, fun experiences.  I’d say that’s not the real world; that’s Disneyworld .  She says, at age 15, that in our real-world pursuit of happiness, we are gathering experiences that at the end of our lifetime might just combine and finally give us our greatest happiness – the most full and satisfying life – the way all the different colors combine to make pure white light. 

            These young people are not finished growing, but they’re not broken.  They see the good and bad as inherent parts of life, and see happiness as living in a way that can let them integrate all of our experiences, and weave them into a character with depth and nuance. 

            We are completely at home in the real world.  Whatever is sacred, is there – which means that whatever is sacred is already within us, too.  We are linked with all other life on earth.  We are part of this world, all the way down.  We are at home here, all the way down.  And our salvation, our wholeness, must be rooted deeply in the real world around us to its most profound and life-giving parts, all the way down.

            That’s the voice you hear coming from our own high school students.  Not because they were taught a doctrine or dogma, but because they were taught that they must think, they must interact with the world and that it can mostly be trusted, and so can their own powers of reasoning and meaning-making.  We are saved, today, not by dogmas or orthodoxies, but by an empowered imagination, and our ability to imagine our own most fulfilling paths through life.

            We’re not broken.  We’re unfinished.  We don’t need to be made holy; we need to be made whole.  And that has changed everything.    We can trust life.  We can trust ourselves, we can trust in the best of human relationships, and it’s ok when we occasionally fail, because failing is part of living, just as succeeding is part of living. 

            Let me sum this up in the words of some local sages.  As we go digging through the big couch of life, we can find things we want, and things we need, as we change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be.  If we want to have really valuable experiences, we have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant.  And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where we expect.  But don’t be afraid of the wide range of life’s experiences, because in the end they can all go together like rays of different colored lights to create a kind of white light so complete we can call it by its ancient religious name: Enlightenment. 

            That isn’t broken.  It’s whole.  It’s blessed.  And it’s very, very good.

 

1 June 2008

Davidson Loehr

First UU Church of Austin, Texas

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.AustinUU.org

PRAYER:

Let us not confuse hype with hope. We know all that glitters is not gold, but let us not be misled when the glitter looks good anyway. Let us not be taken in by someone else’s excited messages that don’t feed our enduring hungers.

We are here to grow into our highest callings as children of the universe, children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us not accept messages that don’t bless us.

May we learn to shun voices that say, “You’re nothing without me. You’re nothing without Jesus. You’re nothing without God.” These messages don’t come from Jesus or God, but from those acting like “used God” salesmen who hawk them for personal profit or power.

Our good news — the kind of truth that can set us free – may indeed be a truth that passes all understanding, but not a truth that bypasses understanding.

We are all looking for good news. We need truth that makes us feel more cherished, more alive and whole, a truth that commands us to serve higher ideals than we might otherwise have done, and live a life of greater integrity and courage than we might have stumbled into. And it must bless us and make us feel beloved of this place. Without these things, it isn’t our good news, and we need to keep listening. For it will come, our good news. Let us keep listening for words of truth and empowerment, the good news that can make us free. For it will come. Amen.

SERMON: Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

We’ve been told, for years, that Christian evangelicals make up 25% of the U.S. population and are growing, that evangelicals and “values voters” delivered the last two presidential elections – rather than that both elections were stolen. We’ve read that atheists are the most distrusted group of people in the country, and that they are at any rate far less moral than the kind of evangelicals who have given the Religious Right so much political power since 1980. Now I like evangelism, and even think of myself as an evangelist. The word means spreading the good news, and I think that’s what honest religion should be about: spreading the good news. But when evangelism isn’t done honestly, when it’s more about deceit than delivery, then it’s a bad thing, the good news lies elsewhere, and we need to know about it.

An author named Christine Wicker has written a new book called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was in town for a presentation last week, and I had several hours to talk with her over a long dinner and longer lunch. I’ll draw on some of her work for the sermon in two weeks. But I want to introduce you to it today in the time we have left, and talk about why she sees the evangelical movement dying, how she says we’ve been duped about the strength of the movement for almost 30 years, and what it might all mean for us: what the good news really is.

Christine was raised an evangelical Baptist, came to Jesus in an altar call when she was nine years old, left the church some time later, and still has a warm place in her heart for evangelicals, though she says she can’t imagine ever wanting to go to church again. She was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years, and understands how to find good sources. She quotes a lot of figures that are quite damning to that picture of evangelicals in America, but all the figures come from inside the churches themselves. Here are a few of the things she says.

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

And as far as respect goes, when asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower. In an almost comic side note, I wonder how the prostitutes feel about that. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 143) Atheists and nonbelievers are looking pretty good.

Misbehavior is so widespread among evangelicals that one evangelical author (Ronald Sider) calls the statistics devastating. When pollster George Barna, himself an evangelical, looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were 300 percent more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 80) Evangelicals make up only seven percent of the population, but about twenty percent of the women who get abortions (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 81).

Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 198). This is part of the bigger picture of the continual decline of Christianity in our culture, which is another story that’s been underreported.

These are just some of the headlines. I’ll go into more facets of this in two weeks, because they have deep and compelling implications for us and for all liberal churches.

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.

What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.

I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.

But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we’ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

During the past century, evangelicals have never kept up with the population growth in this country. Not for a century. They don’t have anywhere near the real power they have claimed. They have fought to make abortion illegal for 35 years. It’s still legal. They have fought for a Constitutional amendment to outlaw homosexuality. Nobody’s buying it. And though they have done harm to and through the Republican Party, they don’t have anything like control there either. Remember that the recent court decisions permitting homosexual marriages in Massachusetts, California and New York all came from Republican judges. They have censored some school textbooks, but one result is that American students now lag far behind students in Europe and Asia, especially in science education, which will make us less competitive. Eventually, even market forces will have to improve the quality of our public education, because we need independent thinking workers, not just obedient ones. They are training for the world of yesteryear, but we and our children are learning to live with imagination and hope in the world of tomorrow. We and the modern world are winning, and will win.

What is at stake is whether children must become independent minded and able to reason through tough decisions on their own at early ages or whether they will be sheltered from such decisions until adulthood by families in which obedience to parental and allegedly godly authority is more highly valued. Parents who’ve changed their parenting style have come to believe that their children need new strengths as they face a rapidly changing world, and those strengths need to be developed early. For these parents, physical punishment encourages violence in later life. Bolstering the child’s self-respect and autonomy is important. The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal for their children and for themselves (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 185). This is the way you’ve raised your own children, but so have a growing army of more conservative parents. As Christine says, when was the last time you saw a child being beaten in public? Public standards have changed, and have become more humane and civil than those of the conservative churches. That’s one way to lose parents and children by the drove.

Trying to hold back the modern world and our sciences and our intellectual freedoms is not like the old picture of the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in a dam trying to keep the water from squirting through. It’s more like a crowd of believers standing side by side in a river, imagining they can stop it. But the water just goes between, around and through them, and the river goes on as if they weren’t there.

The saving message here, the good news, is that America is a very different place than many of us have been led to believe it is. And Americans themselves are a very different kind of people. More thoughtful. More reasoning. Less doctrinaire. More changeable. More flexible. Less religious. This is news of a new and powerful form of salvation that comes from knowing the truth, being aware, and acting in fair and compassionate ways. And growing numbers of people are finding it offers better salvation than the traditional Christian stories (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 56). Sometimes they find it in more liberal churches like this one. Sometimes they just find it on their own. But more and more, they know where they’re not going to find it.

Another way of putting this is that repressive and regressive religions tried to fight the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is winning. The spirit of truth, freedom and empowerment is winning, and religions that can’t embrace that spirit cannot make their people whole. Any way you cut it, from any informed religious, ethical or moral perspective, that’s good news. It’s the kind of good news that can save you – It’s the kind of good news that can save your mind, save your souls and save your children. It’s the kind of good news that can save the world. You can get that good news at a lot of liberal churches. You can get it here. That’s not just good news. That’s Halleluja news! And that’s worth an Amen!