Davidson Loehr
9 November 2008
First UU Church of Austin, Texas
www.AustinUU.org

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PRAYER:

(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)

We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.  

And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service.  Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed.  No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at. 

We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary.  But we don’t live in that world.  And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.

Amen.

 

SERMON:  The Audacity of Hope

Part A: Excited utterances

Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election.  I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote.  I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.

But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week.  Here’s one:

“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.  

Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:  

His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

“My parents … imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.

“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character.  This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy — or girl! — to the White House.  He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.

Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:

Maureen Dowd writes:

“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.  Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.  I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won.  She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)

And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:

“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy….  Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders.  The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.

“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened.  This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics.  It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media.  We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.

“So let’s be blunt.  Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)

Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here.  But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond.  He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.  

Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”

My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents?  Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history.  But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence.  Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago: 

“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”  

Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure — and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books.  And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book.  But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience.  It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.

Part B: the Manger of Hope

I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up.  An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.

And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare. 

But there’s something special about a message of hope.  In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him.  The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:

“In that single [word] ‘hope’ … I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones.  Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story….  Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; ….”  He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire.  Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.  

Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement.  Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless.  I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege.  Those who already own the country don’t need hope.  They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor — which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.  

This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy.  He’s not.  He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.  

But his privilege was earned, not bestowed.  It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements.  Our current president also attended elite schools.  But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them.  George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements.  Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.  

As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope. 

Here’s another kind of metaphor.  Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time.  The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines.  She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody.  But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it.  That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.  

But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s.  Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:

“… we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”  

Those are strong words!  Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.  

Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that.  But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago.  Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female.  Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.   

Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary.  As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.  

But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic.  As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts — he didn’t belong to any majorities.  Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans.  And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States.  He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.  

Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.  

If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House.    Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment.  It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment.  This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.  

 

Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes

We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make.  If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.  

I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you.  You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.  

I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us.  I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.  

I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either. 

This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out.  Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue.  And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change.  But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts — people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive — and I hope he does that.

I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades. 

I don’t know what that would look like.  I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough.  We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.  

So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before. 

PART D.  A Reality Check

Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense?  Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again?  That sort of thing does happen, as you know.  Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?

Well, several things suggest that it can.  Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin.  That was the one dramatic setback for many people.  But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens.  In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%.  In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view.  Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people.  New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them.  And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed.  As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them.  Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html).    Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.  

Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group.  Radical change is possible, and it is happening.  The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats.  Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated.  (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.) 

Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”  

“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.

“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.”  (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)

I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history.  But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:

“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).

I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true.  I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out. 

And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!

Brian Ferguson
November 2, 2008

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Reading – All Souls by May Sarton

Prayer

At this time of year nature and our mythology remind us of the cycles of life and death.   Our environment seems less abundant as trees and plants prepare for winter.  Many cultures in our world claim that the veil between the living and dead is thinner at this time of year.  

For those of us coping with loss of friends and loved ones, that thinness feels vast - and thin.  Vast because our relationship with those who have died has forever changed.  Yet thin because our memory of the dead can keep them close and vital to us.  

The cherished memories of our loved ones who came before remind us of the love they gave us and our love for them.  We are reminded by them that how we live today matters not just to those with us today but the future generations to come.  

As those who came before influence us then we will in turn influence those to come.  If we influence others is not our choice, how we influence them is.  Our time in this life is limited but what we choose to give to others can be abundant.

May our love and concern for others guide us in preserving the memories and values of those who came before - and may we pass on to those who come after the highest values and spirit that enriched our own lives.

Amen 

Today’s reading
is a poem entitled Message in Colors by Spanish Poet Julie Sopetran. Here, in an impressionistic and sensory fashion, the writer tries to convey to us the kind of nostalgia that is a spiritual celebration on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. 

Sermon: What the dead can tell us about coming alive

Today, in the sanctuary we are blessed by these beautiful Altars that were created for our Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations here at the church last night.  Thank you to all of you who created them.  Amidst this explosion of color I am feeling rather drab in my dark suit with only my red tie looking like it belongs up here with all these colors.

This time of year feels really busy.  We just had Halloween on Friday and this weekend we also have the Day of the Dead celebrations.  The election on Tuesday means that we are only three days away from the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Election campaign.  The church year is in full swing with lots of exciting activities happening here most days of the week.  The relaxed days of summer seems a distant memory as Thanksgiving plans are starting to coalesce and Christmas is looming just around the corner.  Thank goodness for that extra hour we gained with the clocks going back last night, we need all the time we can get.  Yet time is a quantity we only have a finite amount of.  Our own health concerns or those around us are a constant reminder that we are creatures of finite lives.  We are particularly sensitive to these issues at this time of year since in many cultures this is a time where we do honor and celebrate the dead.  The Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead is one such tradition.

When I first came to the United States and encountered the Day of the Dead celebration, I naively thought it was just the Mexican version of Halloween.  The proliferation of skeletons in various active poses and sugar skulls seemed to suggest a similar emphasis on the fearful and otherworldly aspects of Halloween.  My assumption of any similarity with Halloween was mistaken.  Day of the Dead focuses on bringing family and friends together to remember and honor those close to us who have died.  

In the poem, Ron read earlier we heard about the atmosphere, beauty, and celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead tradition as families gather at gravesites or in homes with altars similar to what we have here.  The altars contain mementoes and other objects such as flowers, food, and drink.  The intent is to encourage visits from the souls of the dead so they can hear the prayers, music, and stories told in their honor.  The commemoration of the dead has warm and pleasant overtones for the participants.  In the words from the poem “grief battles with life and life wins, it is once again for a little while, happiness and playful tradition which overcomes reality.”   The reality is death but for a brief period through community celebration then grief is transcended.  This festive interaction between the living and the dead in a social ritual helps the living to remember how enriched they were by the lives of those no longer alive.  

Our Halloween celebration is also based on the idea of the dead being able to visit us at this time of year.  The difference is the dead are seen as threatening to the living therefore the tradition of wearing costumes to scare off the dead spirits.  What different approaches to the dead, one celebrating them, the other being fearful of them?  Halloween has no religious significance for us today but the Day of the Dead has its roots in two religious traditions.

The Day of the Dead celebration – and it is a celebration – has its roots back hundreds of years to the indigenous groups in Mexico.  These groups honored their ancestors through gifts and stories.  After the Spanish Conquests of Mexico, the Christian missionaries saw these celebrations as sacrilegious and tried to banish the ritual.  The Spanish had a fearful attitude towards the dead due to the devastation of the great plagues that killed one third of the population in Europe during the late Middle Ages.  After many years of unsuccessfully trying to end the practice, the Spanish Christians then decided to assimilate the celebration.  They moved the indigenous celebration from August to coincide with All Soul’s day which is today November 2nd.  All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic commemoration of the dead so there is a tenuous connection of honoring the dead.  

Christianity like other religions has been very effective co-opting indigenous holidays and making them Christian holidays.  The birth of Jesus on December 25th is widely recognized to be the co-opting of a Roman Solar holiday not the actual birth of Jesus.  The seeming coincidences of Day of the Dead and All Souls Day are not “God working anonymously” as some would claim but the appropriation of a less powerful group’s tradition by a more powerful group.  Interestingly, the Day of the Dead celebration as practiced by most people today has little connection to the actual rituals of the Christian tradition and strong connections to the original ideas of the indigenous, pre-Christian tradition.  

Sadly, like so many religious practices there has been some co-option of this holiday by that most dominant of all our present religions - consumerism.  The commercialization of holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Day of the Dead often take the important symbols of a religion and trivialize them as nothing more than products to be sold.  This may explain why on my first encounter with Day of the Dead I could not see a distinction from the overt commercialization of Halloween.  In the tradition of the Day of the Dead, the significance of the skeletons and sugar skulls are their material symbolism.  The skeletons are symbols for the dead family members, not to be feared, but to be loved and invited to join the celebration of their own lives.  The specific activity that a skeleton is engaged in is usually the favorite activity of the deceased person being honored.  

The desire to have some physical connection to a dead relative or friend is something I suspect many of us can relate to.  Many of us have physical keepsakes that remind us of those special to us.  The other important aspect of the Day of the Dead celebration is the idea of the gifts the living could give to the dead to bring us closer to their spirit and help bring their spirit more fully into our lives.  Of course in Liberal Religion we need to do some translation to bring the idea into our context but I think this is a potentially rich way of thinking for us.  What gifts can we give of ourselves today that would honor and bring us closer to departed family and friends?  Can we live our lives to honor those who through their love, values, and support made us who we are today?  Being a Liberal Religion each of us needs to explore those questions ourselves but perhaps hearing my own struggles with these questions might help you.

I mentioned earlier that this tie may be the only item belonging to me that belongs with these altars.  I was referencing the red color in contrast with the dark, austere colors of my suit.  Remember we Unitarian Universalists are religiously descended from the Puritans who were not famed for their bold color sense.  This tie also belongs on these altars for the symbolism it means to me.  I was given this tie twenty-two years ago for my brother’s wedding by my father. It was his tie and he gave it to me as a family gift.  My father died unexpectedly in January of this year.  Like many of us here who have experienced the loss of someone close to us and perhaps especially a parent whom we’re close to, it is a disorienting experience.  A seemingly ever-present pillar of your life is removed.  It is painful and destabilizing.  This tie for me is an important connection to the memory of my dad.

My dad was an honest, hard working, and plain talking person.  He was bright and inquisitive but not college educated and liked people to speak in plain language grounded in what he called the real world.  I remind myself to keep my words honest, respectful, and accessible.  My dad always loved a good argument and would often disagree with me just for the discussion.  Family discussions around the dinner table had always been a huge part of my family culture for as long as I can remember.  I believe the constant questioning and discussions in my family home set me on my long and winding path to finding a home in Unitarian Universalism.  When I question with honesty, sincerity, respect, and clarity then I believe I am closer to the spirit of my dad while serving important religious values.

Davidson in a sermon a few weeks ago gave a wonderful example of living life as if all the great people of history were watching – living under the gaze of eternity I think he called it.  As daunting as that sounds it does seem to be powerful guidance for living a good life.  I also think it is in keeping with this spirit of Liberal Religion to consider some of the people who are watching us to be our dead relatives and friends who we most admired and were influential on us.  When we invoke the memory of them to guide or motivate us in our lives then we are invoking their spirit and by doing so we are honoring them.  I believe this is what May Sarton was saying in the earlier poem:  

“Now the dead move through all of us still glowing, 
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend 
Our complex love, our mourning without end.” 

We are engaging with both the inspiration and the sadness of those important people who are no longer with us physically.  At the heart of grief and mourning is the struggle we have dealing with multiple emotions simultaneously:  the joy that person brought to us in our lives and the sadness at their absence, the anger at what is seemingly unresolved and fear of how we can live life without them.  Our mourning does not end since we are reminded of them as they continue to influence us through their example.

As part of the Day of the Dead celebration many Mexican families tell stories about the dead person each year to keep their memory and influence alive.  I think there is great value in this.  In our religion the memorial services fill this formal role on a one time basis shortly after their death.  We do not have a religious tradition of regularly telling a person’s story.  What I wanted to do for my dad became clear to me when I was clearing through photographs when preparing to move here from San Francisco in June.  

I was looking at some photographs and I found one of my dad when he was two years old and a photograph of when I was last with him just over a year ago.  I looked at him in both photographs and thought what really connects these two completely different people - the fresh-faced two year old boy in 1932 and the haggard face seventy-five years later which showed the years of discomforting illness.  What became clear to me is that it is the stories, experiences, and relationships connecting the people in the two photographs.  I realized that I knew only a small portion of those stories.  The father-son relationship, though intimate and important, is a limited lens through which to view any person.  

Being a father myself, I’m acutely aware of the narrow view my five-year old daughter has of me – I’m a mode of transportation and a rather large climbing frame but primarily I’m the authority figure who denies her all things fun.  Don’t believe her when she says I denied her any candy on Halloween.  I think I allowed her one piece.  To broaden my own view of my father I’ve undertaken a project to write his eulogy not from my own perspective or people I know well but from those who I do not know well and had a relationship with my dad very different from me. His friends when he was in the Air Force as a young man, the people who were his apprentices at work, and his brother in Canada who knew him during his early years.  This will help me get a fuller perspective beyond just his later life as a father and perhaps gain insights into why he was the person he was.  

When a person dies we can often freeze our relationship with them at the time of their death and not remember the changes that occurred in the relationship over the course of their life.  I believe that we can continue to change our relationship even with those who are dead by getting a fuller understanding of who they were.  As long as they are alive there is often that vain hope that they may still change to become the person we want them to be.  Seventy-six years wasn’t enough perhaps the seventy-seventh year of their life will be the one they make the change I desire of them.  Ah the eternal hopeful human spirit especially when it is about someone else changing and not ourselves.  

When a person dies we give up any hope of them changing but if we choose we can change our own beliefs of that person.  Perhaps what we wanted them to change was just not that important and we focus on those more important eternal attributes of the person that are important to us - their love for us despite our imperfections, their confidence in us despite our own doubts, or their friendship despite our sometimes feeling unworthy of it.  The death of someone allows us to reframe what we remember about their life – for good and for bad – and perhaps allows us to see the essence of the person beyond the often trivial disagreements that are so much part of our everyday lives.

Despite the inevitability of death for all of us, it is not a subject that is discussed much in our society.  There is often avoidance until it is thrust upon on us through our own loss.  Many people, religious and non-religious, often turn to religion or religious leaders for guidance at this time.  Religion is where we try to find some meaning and comfort about death.  Different religions have different ideas about what happens to us when we die.  Many propose some form of existence beyond this life, a hope that we will be reunited in some form with those who died before us.  I understand the desire for this but to me what happens beyond death is a mystery – and perhaps it is good that it is a mystery.  This allows grief-stricken people to find hope in different ways during difficult times.  I have seen the solace and strength that friends of mine have gained from believing they would be reunited with a deceased child or young spouse in the future.  This is not a denial of death but a belief in something beyond death.  I personally struggle to share their beliefs but I cannot be certain what happens after death and at times even feel a little envious of the comfort these beliefs give them.

What I can be certain of is that death is a transformational experience for those close to the deceased.  Our lives are changed as we are reminded of our own mortality.  We are finite beings with a limited time in this life and it matters what we do with our life.   I have heard the Spanish expression Manana described as meaning something might get done tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe next month.  I heard someone being asked if we had any equivalent of that expression in Scotland and he replied that we had no word to convey that sense of urgency.  Urgency is not a good way of determining what is important.  Our lives seem to be surrounded by urgency.  Urgency of creating Halloween costumes, making Thanksgiving plans, buying Christmas presents and even writing sermons.  While death gives us a finite time we should react to this restriction by prioritizing what really is important.

Manana can be thought of as something never being started because of procrastination, alternatively it can mean something will never be completed because it transcends our timeframe.  I suspect what is really most important is not what we get done before we die but those projects that we begin that will transcend our deaths.  For example the work we do in community to address the social ills such as poverty, violence, hunger, racism, and sexism.  This work to heal our world will not be completed in my life time – improved I hope but not completed.  By building institutions such as this church with our time and money we hope this work and the promotion of our religious values to others will continue after we are gone.  This is legacy work since it transcends our own life span.

I talked earlier about how a focus of Day of the Dead was the gifts whose purpose was to bring the spirit of the dead closer to us.  Our legacy is the reverse of this, what will we dedicate ourselves to now that will be a gift to others when we are dead?  Our time in this life is finite but our legacy and what we choose it to be is not.  How we preserve the memory and values of those who came before us and pass on our values and spirit to others are perhaps the most important questions we will address in our lives.  By acknowledging the reality of death and the losses we have in common we may find what is most meaningful in our life and worth passing on to future generations.  And when we do that we are honoring the full human experience and celebrating life’s longing for itself.

Sopetran, Julie,  Message in Colors from the book Mexico City, Mixquic & Morelos – Through the Eyes of the Soul, Day of the Dead in Mexico. 
http://library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ03066/poems_english.html#message accessed on October 30th, 2008.

Sewell, Marilyn ed.  Cries of the Spirit  (Boston, Ma: Beacon Press, 1991) p.131

Davidson Loehr
26 October 2008
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas

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PRAYER:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be significant, formidable, powerful? Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. 

— Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech — words adapted from Marianne Williamson

SERMON:  How You Should Vote

So many conservative preachers have been telling their people how to vote for so long that I began to wonder if I was being derelict in my duty.  After all, we’re trying to do honest religion here.  And surely honest religion also has some light to shed on the upcoming election.  

So that’s what I want to do this morning.  I want to bring this election – and I mean this presidential election – home to you in a way that might make it more clear just how you should vote on November 4th.

It’s a complex subject, and I first need to sketch a much bigger picture before I can then bring this election – or any- important election – into it.

Many of you know the story about two wolves that comes from our Native American tradition.  A young boy who was the strongest and most popular boy in the tribe went to see his grandfather for some wisdom.  He was strong and clever enough to take whatever he wanted from others, and one voice within him said he should do it.  On the other hand, he felt it wasn’t fair, taking things from others that they needed, just because he could get away with it.  His grandfather nodded, and said yes, he had the same two voices within him.  He thought of them as two wolves.  One always urged him to take what he could get away with, to use his advantages over others to his own advantage, not theirs.  The other wolf always wanted him to be decent, compassionate, someone who was a blessing to all around him rather than just to himself.  

I want to talk about these two wolves this morning, because they are in all of us.  We are not all the strongest, cleverest and most popular, but we have other advantages.  Maybe we have more education than the majority of others, or we attended elite schools, and both expect and know that just the fact that we attended an elite school will open doors for us that aren’t opened for others, and we like it.  It seems only fair.  Or perhaps we’ve made or inherited more money than most others – I’m convinced that the ability to make money is a gift that a few have but most don’t – and righteously cling to the advantages and security that brings.  Or we’re more attractive than most, and have learned how to use that to our advantage.  But let’s not get so fuzzy that we fail to see the obvious.  And what’s obvious is that, while we have lots of individual traits that give us an advantage over others, the differences that really make the most difference in the world have always been differences in power: the ability to get and keep power.  

The wolf with power has a different view of power and its privileges than the wolves without power have, and a different plan for How Things Should Work.  I’m going to call this Plan A, or Plan Alpha, for it is the scheme of things as designed by the Alpha males and females.

The other wolf favors Plan Beta, or Plan B.  It’s about weaker, squishier things, like empathy, compassion, reciprocity, caring almost as much for others as for ourselves, and so on.  It is certainly the weaker wolf.  

Plan B serves the people who aren’t an alpha.  They are, in every species, the overwhelming majority, yet throughout history they have almost always been successfully subdued, disempowered and ruled by the alphas.  It may seem amazing that so few can rule over so many for so long – but it looks like Nature’s Way.  And in fact, we have millions of years of history showing that is Nature’s Way.  Alphas have always written the rules for their groups – in dolphins, dogs, elephants and apes, including human apes.

The strongest take what they want, the weaker submit as they must, or they will be put in their place through violence or threats of violence.  You can see it in a hundred nature films, or read about it in the daily news. 

In at least two species, the art of politics has developed as a more subtle and effective expression and transmission of power.  I’ve brought you some descriptions from a well-known book on politics.  They are pretty blunt, but see if you can’t recognize them:

“… politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary.  Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females — or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females.  Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years.”  Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader — or as we call them, elections.

The two mottoes of … politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)

And political alliances are not personal, but functional — not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful.  Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.  

Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)

As I said, that’s a little blunt, but most of us would say yes, that’s our species, and it is.  However, most of these observations came from a book called Chimpanzee Politics, written in 1982 and now a minor classic.  The author, who has spent his life studying apes, was describing chimpanzees.  And he says humans and chimpanzees are the only two species who do politics this way.  

So you can understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, back in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)

It’s another way of saying our political style evolved by three million years ago, and perhaps the only major way in which our species has advanced beyond chimpanzees since then is through our invention of money, media and lobbyists.  Not everyone would consider that an advance.  

Why seek power?  In any species, why seek power? It’s not for the sake of power, but for the entitlement that power brings – entitlement to food, mates and pretty much whatever else the top dogs want.   

The alpha male chimpanzees, who do about 95% of the breeding in their troops, would think our alpha males have a severe testosterone deficiency, but we know that isn’t always true either.  There are stories going all the way back to George Washington, saying he was father of this country in more ways than one – though you only have to turn on the news to see that we do have some modern politicians trying to uphold that ancient tradition.  

The observation that Rank Hath Its Privileges didn’t originate with our species.  Thousands of species had been playing that out for tens of millions of years before we came along.  And maybe if chimpanzees had invented boats or learned to ride horses and make really destructive weapons, they would have invented the idea of empire.    

I don’t have to sketch out any more of this.  You all know this movie because we’re in it.  You can even take a half hour drive and go up the dominance alphabet from omega to alpha here in Austin just by starting out east of I-35 and driving west.  

Power and Privilege for the Alphas and Obedience for the masses are the holy trinity of Plan A in thousands of species, always underwritten by violence and threats of violence.  The benefits of Plan A are very appealing, at least if you’re up near the top of the alphabet.   

In Plan B, the Betas, Gammas, Deltas on down the dominance alphabet are also concerned primarily with their own interests, and the political structure that would serve them best.  Of course, they are the vast majority.  But they have been subjugated and ruled in almost every species for tens of millions of years.  They are the underdogs.  

Plan B is certainly the weaker and less likely plan.  And not surprisingly, most of those in favor of Plan B are those without much power or wealth.  

Yet as powerful as the history and logic of Plan Alpha are, Plan B has also had many profound and enduring champions, including the key prophets and sages of almost every religion and philosophy in human history.  

For starters, just think of the words “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.”  It’s called the Golden Rule because you can find a version of it in almost every religion.  It is saying that the only Alpha people God recognizes are the moral Alpha people who show more empathy, compassion and courage than most around them – not those with more money or power.  Jesus was even clear that those who get their rewards here will not get them in heaven, where things run according to God’s values.  

The Plan B sentiments may be terribly unlikely, but they are among the most famous and endearing teachings of almost every religion on earth.  

The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu, written five centuries before Jesus lived, is so explicit it sounds like an op-ed piece from yesterday’s news.  It says, “When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn — all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53, Stephen Mitchell translation) 

A quick Google search will show you unambiguous quotations supporting Plan B from Bahá’í, Buddhism,  Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Shinto, Sikhism, Sufism, Taoism, and dozens of others.  All the religions seem to agree that the fundamental law that helps us become most fully human is reciprocity: not doing things to others that we wouldn’t want them to do to us.  Most people would see this as the polar opposite of Plan Alpha, Nature’s Plan that has dominated biological evolution forever.  

These two plans, these two wolves, are the diametrically opposed philosophies of life that have polarized us throughout human history.  Even in this country, they go all the way back to our founding fathers.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed.  Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).  

Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46)  Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly.  The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained.  His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48)  That’s Nature’s Way, expressed in a language of our species.  

Now let’s bring the picture into a little sharper focus.  Here’s where the differences between the Alpha and Beta plans shape and misshape our nation today.

Plan A:  For Plan Alpha, if privilege and empowerment rightfully belong only to the winners, to those with a lot of money and power – as Mother Nature seems to say it does – then if you are poor or powerless, it’s probably because you deserve to be.  You lack discipline, haven’t worked as hard or as smart as the Alphas.  You don’t deserve things like health care or a good education if you can’t afford them, because health care and education are commodities like other commodities, and you’re being not only out of line but also selfish pretending you have a right to things you can’t pay for. 

By the same logic, worker unions are against Nature’s Plan – Plan A.  It doesn’t matter that there are twenty to forty times more non-Alphas.  They don’t have, haven’t earned or bought effective power, and this is about power and its privileges.  Asking the powerful to share their money – through higher taxes and fewer privileges – just to keep the weak alive, or even to strengthen them so they might actually become able to threaten the privileged position to which the Alphas feel entitled – well, as you can hear, it’s unnatural and immoral.  And if God is the voice of the natural and moral order, then God is also against it. 

The free market also has a moral imperative, because it enables those with power to keep it.  It isn’t a fair fight, but it’s not supposed to be.  The fight’s over.  It’s about maintaining privilege.  Even chimpanzees know that.

Plan B.  Plan B people see these things very differently.  They want to measure society by different currencies – by compassion, empathy, empowerment of the many rather than what they see as the unholy trinity of power and privilege for the few and fearful obedience for the rest.  

They look at data saying that 18,000 Americans die every year because of inadequate health care, and they see health care as protection, just as police and fire protection, food safety, and adequately tested drugs are protection of our citizens.  And this changes it from a mere individual commodity to part of the moral mission of government, part of the compassion we owe one another, even to what God demands of us.  
(NOTE: I’m grateful to George Lakoff for the understanding of healthcare as protection rather than commodity.  See his book The Political Mind.)

If they’re Christian, they may quote Jesus’ saying “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,” then connect it not only to the 18,000 of us dying each year, but also to the more than 40 million of us without health care, and they say “Jesus would hate this.”  

They can see worker unions in the same way, as necessary protection of the weaker many against the powerful few, who seem so easily tempted to a kind of greed that Plan B folks see as selfish and brutal.

The “free market” looks very different, too.  For one thing, it isn’t free.  Without government protection, our lawmakers have allowed or encouraged rapacious people to rob us of well over a trillion dollars, while making huge personal profits.  Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Weil figures that since the start of fiscal year 2004, the once Mighty Five of Wall Street – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – lost around $83 billion in stock market value.  But they reported employee compensation of around $239 billion.  In other words, the engineers who dug this disastrous hole paid themselves almost three dollars for every dollar they lost.  To the Betas, this looks like socialism for the rich and a vicious kind of capitalism for the rest of us.  (Taken from “For Whom the Bailout Tolls,” Saturday 25 October 2008, by Michael Winship, Truthout/Perspective.)  

This latest trillion-dollar bailout will cost every U.S. household close to $9,000.  (As calculated by the Internet investigative newsroom ProPublica.org) It has transferred the private debt of a few to all of us by making us pay for it with our taxes.  

“The ‘free market’ doesn’t free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission.” (George Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 63)

You could say this is just a reminder of the real-world power of the Alpha Plan, and that the rest of us need to grow up and accept our natural place.  But to the majority of humans, even if they are afraid to speak up, it just sounds greedy and brutal, lacking even the most basic compassion all of our religions have always taught.  

This brings me to the coming election.  As citizens, we need to practice speaking up.  Voting is practice in speaking up.  It’s not much, and it’s certainly not enough, but it’s practice.  

Here’s one more fact that can be seen in at least a couple ways.  Three years ago, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers in Washington D.C. was 65:1.  I couldn’t find more recent statistics online, though did find one other seeker making the same complaint.  While that can sound hopelessly lopsided, there’s another way to see it.  It is also saying that elected politicians’ inclinations to serve the majority of people who elected them may be so deep and strong that it can take up to sixty-five times as much energy to persuade them to betray us.  Though here in Texas, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers is only 8:1, so the lawmakers in Washington can also just look like higher-priced rentals.

I began with a story of the two wolves, but I didn’t finish it.  The boy was frustrated by his grandfather’s admission that he too had always had these two wolves fighting to control his soul.  “But grandfather,” he finally said, “which wolf wins?”  His grandfather looked deep into his eyes – one of those looks that can connect two souls – and said, “The one that I feed, grandson, the one that I feed.”

Voting is throwing food to these wolves.  Plan A has been and will probably always be the dominant plan for almost every animal species on earth.  And as much as prophets like Jesus, Mohammad, Lao Tzu and the rest preach about Plan B as the highest human path, or as Jesus’ definition of the kingdom of God, I don’t know that Plan B has ever defined a U.S. government, though some have been much closer to it than others.  

There has probably never been a presidential candidate who was a pure example of either Plan Alpha or Plan Beta.  All are mixtures; there are no unadulterated angels or demons here.  But they all lean more toward one than the other, and the direction of their leaning is important.  

I started to tell you how you should vote, and I want to finish that.  To me as a minister, voting is above all else a spiritual activity, where we can speak up for our deepest and most cherished values and beliefs.  When we vote, we are standing before our God, before all that is holy to us.  

When you stand before that little touch-screen voting machine, I want you to know that you are not alone.  There are two wolves there with you, each singing “Stand by Me”.  Don’t try to face them alone.  Take with you the image of those whose love has meant the most of you, those for whom you have the deepest respect.  Take the spiritual teachings that have most deeply touched your soul.  Take the mental image of all the people in your whole life who expected only the very best from you, and who knew you were capable of it.  Look at them, and let them look you straight in the eye – that look that connects your souls. Then, in front of that audience, push only the buttons that you can be most proud to have pushed.  

That’s how you should vote.

Davidson Loehr
19 October 2008
First UU Church of Austin, Texas

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PRAYER:

Let us trust in the Holy Spirit.  That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.

When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.

When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.

When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.

And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.

The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become.  The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world.  That invitation may be our salvation.  Let us take it.  Amen.

SERMON:  The Holy Heretical Spirit

Note from the webmaster: Emerson’s Divinity School Address is linked here.

This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek.  I’ll try to be brief.

I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years.  Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.

Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian.  He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.

He also has a connection to this church.  In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s.  And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s  granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.

We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.

When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.

The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years.  Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct.  But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.

And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years.  Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years.  The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin.  Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.

This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day.  What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible?  Where were we to stand?  Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive?  These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.

The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles.  Emerson didn’t.  He took all of this psychologically.  He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.

This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.

The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion.  Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.

While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion.  The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us.  It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere.  That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options.  This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God.  Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God … is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 - 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).”  ”The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 - 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)

But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran?  Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now.  But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.

It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so.  The books can be wrong.  So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures.  And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.

In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology.  Religion is about our becoming all that we can be.  All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army.  People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it.  Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God.  The gods are our best traits, writ large.  We are the projector, they are the screen.

These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old.  He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians.  The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 - 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).”  And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 - 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).

His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians.  They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 - 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74).  It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades.  It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.

He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it.  After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”

He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time.  He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”

He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings.  I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.’” (In fact, that person was him.  It was something he wrote to his wife.)

Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions.  He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust.  He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves.  Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course.  Some are foolish, or evil.  But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.

You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.

You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death.  Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient.  That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit.  I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered.  She lives in Austin.  These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.

All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil.  And I agree with him.  There is nothing about any real God in any of them.  And we can all see this.  When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.

All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole.  And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that.  If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.

You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature.  Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door.  But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god.  All those, including the gods, are human creations.  The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are.  But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.

The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt.  Do you see how radical it is?  Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.

But honest religion is a style, not a position.  When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it.   Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it.  Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life.  The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in.  ”Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.

The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism.  And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth.  Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.

When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now.  But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them.  St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at.  The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.

This life-giving spirit is called many things.  One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy.  People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics.  Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing.  The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.”  Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth.  So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions.  Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.

It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt.  It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life.  And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.

You can see this spirit at every level of life.  It is what makes plants turn toward the sun.  It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them.  I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment.  That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.

There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us.  It’s the energy that helps us come more alive.  We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives.  In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols.  And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life.  I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be.  So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted.  And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them.  It’s looking for us.  And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.

Rev. Davidson Loehr and Rabbi Michael LeBurkien
12 October 2008

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

 

NOTES ON THIS SERVICE:
This is a service borrowing from and centered in some of the Jewish tradition and thought about these topics of repentance and atonement that are the center of Judaism’s highest holy days.  Rabbi LeBurkien is now a member of this church, and was gracious enough to provide many materials – and some basic education for me – on these two holidays.  He also brought his shofar and played it at the beginning and end of the service.  Most of the ritual words here were taken or adapted from Jewish materials, while the sermon was my attempt to incorporate some of the wisdom from these stories and traditions into our own tradition of doing honest religion in ordinary language.  Since it’s an unusual service, I’ve included almost all spoken parts of the service, to give a more rounded feel for it.  
— Davidson Loehr

SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR

According to some Jewish writers, the sound of the shofar is like a prayer, or even like the voice of God in our midst.  We welcome both.  Please join me in the responsive invocation written in your order of service.

READING: THE STORY OF JOSEPH

The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, Now Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, so he made a coat of many colors for him. When his brothers saw the coat they believed that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, and began to hate their brother.  

Joseph had a series of dreams which he told his brothers about.  The first was of binding up of sheaves in the field., and Joseph’s  sheaf rising and standing up, and the brothers’  sheaves gathered round and bowed to Joseph’s.  This dream stirred the brothers’ hatred again.  Joseph came to them again with another dream in which the sun, moon and 11 stars bowed down to him.  His father scolded him “am I and your mother and brothers to bow down to you”? The father pondered his son’s dreams and wondered what these meant.   And again his brothers increased their hatred of their brother Joseph who was unaware of their feelings against him.  After his brothers left to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem, Jacob spoke with Joseph about following them and bringing back word of their work with his flocks.

And so Joseph set off but his brothers saw him at a distance and began plotting the murder of their brother because of their hatred and jealousy.  They wanted to kill Joseph and throw him into a pit but the oldest brother, Rueben, wanted Joseph to be saved from being murdered and said “do not shed any blood; throw him in the pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay hands on him.”   When Joseph reached his brothers they took his coat of many colors and after stripping him of it they threw him into the pit.  After these deeds, the brothers sat down to eat a meal and as they ate, they watched a caravan of Ishmaelites from and in doing so saved my life, Gilead coming with their spices, balm and laudanum bound for Egypt.  Brother Judah went in another direction and said to his brothers  “Instead of slaying Joseph and leaving him in the pit for wild animals, let us sell him to this caravan of Ishmaelites and not lay hands on him.  After all he is our brother.”  His brothers agreed and sold Joseph for 20 shekels of silver, and the Ismaelites took him to Egypt.  They returned the bloody coat to their father and Joseph was believed to have died from animal attack.

Joseph did well in the land of Egypt. He worked very hard and bought himself out of slavery, and rose in importance to become close to the king or Pharaoh.  Eventually drought and famine came to Canaan where Joseph’s family lived and his brothers had to come to Egypt to buy food.   He had his brothers brought before him and contemplated taking revenge against them but could not.  His brothers did not recognize him as a man but were fearful of his power and when they were again brought to the palace he began weeping and all heard him say, “I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt.  Be not grieved nor angry but hurry back to my father and speak to him from his son Joseph:  You will live near me, you, your sons, your grandsons, your flocks and herds and all that belongs to you and I will provide for you through the years of famine to come.  You must tell my father who I am in Egypt, and all you have seen and bring him back here to me.” All the brothers, the 12 sons of Jacob, wept upon each other’s shoulders.

PRAYER: A RESPONSIVE LITANY OF ATONEMENT 

Leader: For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference.

LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.

RIGHT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT OUR FEARS HAVE MADE US RIGID AND INACCESSIBLE

Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

LEFT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT WE HAVE STRUCK OUT IN ANGER WITHOUT JUST CAUSE 

RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.

Leader: For each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others 

LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.

RIGHT SIDE: FOR THE SELFISHNESS WHICH SETS US APART AND ALONE 

Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

LEFT SIDE: FOR FORGETTING THAT WE ARE ALL PART OF ONE FAMILY

RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.

Leader: For those and for so many things big and small that make it seem we are separate.

ALL: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.

SERMON:  Atonement

We are reflecting on two of Judaism’s high holy days this morning, Rosh Hashanah, which was September 30-1 October, is their spiritual New Year.  And Yom Kippur, which ended the ten days of repentance and atonement this past Thursday.

Rosh Hashanah is a time of repenting for bad actions toward other people, a time for looking inside, asking what kind of people our actions have shown us to be in the past year.  Before forgiveness can happen, we have to confess to the people we believe we have wronged.  

Yom Kippur, the end of this ten days, is called the Day of Atonement.  “Atonement” is a wonderful theological term, and its spelling is its meaning: at-one-ment.  Being at one with yourself and your highest and most life-giving values – or in theological language, with your God.  To do this, you first have to be at one with your neighbors, so it’s really a complete kind of at-one-ment.  We’d all be happier if we had it. 

Most of Judaism is for Jews, just as most of Christianity is for Christians.  But there are parts of all religions that are ours for the taking, and we want to learn from them if we can.  Those parts are the insights into the human condition, and the wisdom for living more wisely and well.  That’s part of what theologians call the Wisdom Tradition, and wisdom is always free, offered to all who are willing to hear it and take it to heart. 

As we sometimes do on New Year’s Eve, Jews also make resolutions for the new year.  And like the rest of us, they usually fail to keep many of them.  The world seldom cooperates with all of our resolutions, and then what do we do?  They’re harder than we hoped they would be when we made them.  Life can put us in a hole or back us into a corner or frighten us, and we lower our expectations and our standards.  

This is part of the religious lesson of that story of Joseph that Rabbi LeBurkien told you earlier.  It’s a wonderful story, and I want to visit it from a different angle this morning.  Joseph’s brothers were horrible to him.  If you looked in the Hall of Fame for Dysfunctional Families, their group photo would be there.  Some wanted to kill him, others to throw him into a deep hole so the wild animals would eat him, and the kindest of them decided simply to sell him into slavery.  If you got to choose your brothers, nobody would choose them.  

Years later, Joseph has risen to power through the strength of his own character and the luck of life.  His brothers – due to bad luck, which in this story is also meant as a judgment on their character – are brought before him.  Joseph can take all the vengeance he wants now.  He can get even with them in spades for everything they did to him and everything they thought about doing to him. 

But what would he gain?  Sure, it would give him a wonderful cheap thrill, getting even.  And you know how good that feels, don’t you?  But then he would have stooped to their level.  He would be showing that he was their brother in the worst way rather than in the best way.  It wouldn’t be anything you could be proud of if you thought God was watching – and in these stories, God is usually watching.  

What Joseph did in this ancient myth by acting out of love, out of his highest and proudest ideals, is more than most of us might do.  That’s why the story has remained so powerful all these centuries.  It calls us to a higher plane of being, to live out of only our proudest ideals.  That’s important because life can still frighten us away from those high ideals if we let it.

Unless we can forgive a past that cannot be changed, we will carry anger, resentment and the hope for vengeance or anger or a paralyzing fear into the future.  Then we won’t be starting a new year after all, but repeating some of the poisonous parts of the one we just had – like the movie “Groundhog Day,” reliving the same sorry situation again and again.  So instead, we forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.

Joseph forgave his brothers, redefined them as brothers rather than enemies, they embraced and went into the future together, and into our common mythology as one of the most challenging and inspiring stories we’ve ever told.  This isn’t just about forgiving some awful brothers.  It’s really about forgiving life for not pleasing us.  This makes it easy to see that this old story isn’t really about Joseph.  It’s really about us, and about life.  What do we do when we’re scared, angry or resentful?  Because the world really isn’t made in the image of our desires.  And every once in awhile, it rises up to remind us of that, and to say, “Now what will you do?”

Think of the current economic mess our country and growing parts of the world are in.  It isn’t fair.  You’ve read the same stories I have.  The whole situation is more complex than I understand, and maybe there’s a lot more to it than we’re being told right now, I don’t know.  But stocks have fallen, some people have lost thousands from their retirement funds, and other countries are panicked as well.   

Nonprofits and churches are also worried because right now, in this panic, charitable giving is slowing down.  People are afraid want to put their money under their pillow, or under a rock.  And under the heading of Really Interesting Timing, we’re in the middle of our own annual pledge drive just as this whole subject of money has become one people don’t want to talk about.  We don’t have anywhere near enough people on our stewardship committee to share the tasks without burning out.  It’s hard to talk about money because people are afraid and don’t want to hear about it or think about it.  A lot of people are afraid that the light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train.  This shows us once again that Denial isn’t a river in Egypt – the river runs right through us.  

We are Joseph, thrown into a hole.  Not by this or that Republican or Democrat or Congress, but by Life.  Sometimes, it favors us, sometimes it doesn’t, because life isn’t created in the image of our own wishes or needs.  

We are Joseph.  Do we allow ourselves to be ruled by fear and anger?  People could understand if we did, because it’s what many of them are doing.  So many strong winds blowing us in so many directions right now.  Which winds do we let blow us around?

Should we give up on the pledge drive, cancel the wonderful building campaign we have planned for our children, our programs, our future, cancel all two dozen of our split-the-plate recipients and sell the church for spare parts?  

Now when we start thinking this way, we know we’re wrong, because this is a church where we are here because we want to learn how to serve high and brave and life-giving ideals, not fears that make us shrink back from life.  We will not be frightened away from life.

We need to back off a little to ask whether it’s realistic to stay in a hole of doom and gloom, whether the sky is really falling as Chicken Little always, always believes, or whether there are life-giving and healing insights that are also true.  They can come from folk wisdom and stories, but also from straight facts, so let’s start with some of those. 

I read an article from a company called Resource Services Inc. this week that our new executive director Sean Hale passed around, and then went online to learn more about this company.  It was founded in 1972 by two evangelical classmates from Baylor University, to help churches plan successful capital campaigns, and at one point, of the 25 largest successful church capital campaigns in history, all but one of them was planned by this company.  So they have learned a lot about the vicissitudes of economics and economic history.  

Here are just a few facts from a paper they published six years ago, during the panic after 9-11 (“Christian Giving in Uncertain Times” from the NACBA Seminar, a Presentation of Bill Wilson of RWI, July 9, 2002):

The total amount of giving in the U.S. has increased every year but one for the past 40 years, including through wars, recessions and other crises.  Each year we have given more than the previous year.  

These crises do tend to paralyze us for a short time, but in the calendar year following crises, the giving grew at a greater rate than it did during the crisis year. 

The larger a church is, the more likely their members are to support it. About 70% supported churches under 100 members, while about 87% supported churches of 500 or more.  

People in the South and West give more per capita than those in the Midwest and Northeast.

 “People with the strongest convictions are the most likely to support their worldview financially….” (from George Barna)

Commitments to capital campaigns aren’t usually affected much by economic crises, partly because they’re received over a three-year period.

They suggest thinking about it this way: everything we give, Life gave to us first.  It isn’t so much a giving as it is a giving-back.

The economy always recovers.  Even if this is going to be compared to the great scares like the 1987 stock market crash, or the one way back in 1929, the economy is now far more global.  As we’re seeing, economies all over the world are affected and working on it.  Too much is at stake for too many people to let everything slide off a cliff. 

In other words, it is safe to act as though our highest values are still our best guides to living now.  We don’t cancel our split-the-plate practice, because we want to heal our world, not withdraw from it.  We want to be people, and a church, that are conspicuous because we choose to serve life, to come alive, not to stay in the hole we’ve been thrown into. 

As the preacher Robert Schuler once put it, “Tough times never last; tough people do.”  We don’t get to choose our crises, but we do get to choose how we will act in them.  

The next year or two may well be tough.  Tough times are a part of living.  They are the times that show us what we’re made of when we’re in that hole. 

I can tell you that I’d rather be representing a church right now than any other kind of business.  Because we’re not defined by productivity or the bottom line, and we don’t outsource your souls to another country.  We’re defined by the power of the ideals we serve, and their ability to steer us through even – and especially – these wonderfully challenging times. 

This past Wednesday I attended the Kol Nidre service at Congregation Agudis Achim, a local conservative congregation, and heard a new version of an old story.  I want to share it with you. 

An older man was out walking on the beach one day when he noticed, far ahead of him, a young woman who would bend down, pick something up, throw it into the ocean, then walk on until she stopped and did it again.  Curious, he walked toward her, and as he got closer he saw she was picking up starfish, one at a time, and throwing them back into the ocean.   

He walked up to her and said, “Why are you doing that?”  “I’m saving starfish,” she answered.  “The ocean washes them up onto the beach where they’ll die.  I throw them back to their home.”  

He laughed.  “Why are you wasting your time?  The ocean has been doing this for millions of years.  Millions of starfish have died on the beach, and always will.  Do you honestly think you can make any difference?” 

She walked over to another starfish, picked it up, and threw it back into the ocean.  She turned to the man and said, “It made a difference to that one.”  

The man hadn’t expected this, because as you know, negativity and cynicism can usually silence most arguments, even when it’s wrong.  But it forced him to think, and to act.  As she walked on, he joined her, and before long he bent over, picked up a starfish, threw it back to the sea, and a big smile broke out on his face.  

Some other people on the beach who had been watching this interchange began getting up and walking toward the ocean, picking up starfish and tossing them into the sea.  Soon nearly everyone was doing it, and kept doing it until they had covered the whole beach.  When the last starfish had been thrown back to its home in the ocean, the people all cheered and hugged one another. 

Like the story of Joseph, that beach is a metaphor for life.  Bad stuff is part of life, and sometimes we actually come to believe that we’re powerless – what difference could we possibly make?  But the real truth about us is just how powerful we really are if we will act on our highest values, no matter what life brings us.  Because people are watching.  We are watching.  We’re watching each other, and the courage of a few people can have an amazing effect in giving others the courage of their own convictions.  Then before you know it, we’ve cleaned up the beach, kept this exciting and life-giving liberal church on its healthy path, and built a lovely new building for our children, our programs and our future.  Then comes the laughing and cheering.  Cheering ourselves, for having the courage of our deepest convictions, the courage to come alive, embrace our most life-giving truths, and begin healing ourselves and our world.  

If you have hesitated to come into our pledge drive, or have entered it hesitantly and would be prouder to invest more of your money, time and spirit here, I advise you to come in boldly.  Come join us on this wonderful and challenging beach of life.  Help us clean the fearful and paralyzing debris off of it.  Help us return everything to life.

Make the kind of strong and confident pledge you’d really like to for next year.  If it takes us all a little longer than we think to restore health to our economy and you need to adjust your pledge next spring or summer, of course you can do that.  But for now, be hopeful and bold because that gives life both to us and to you. 

This isn’t an economic matter; it’s a religious mission.  It is a mission of at-one-ment, coming to be at one with our proudest ideals and highest values.  So come join us on this beach, and help us maintain it and ourselves as beacons of light, life and hope.  The work together is inspiring and fun.  And afterwards, there will be this party and this cheering that you don’t want to miss.  Join us!

BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR

Now once more, hear the sound of the shofar,

Splitting the air, reminding us to let go of unworthy goals and selfish behaviors, and instill in our hearts a new spirit.

Heed the sound of the shofar,

Sounding its cry of awakening –

Urging us to accept the challenge to triumph

Over the forces of anger and fear.

And all of their many poisonous fruits.

Let us heed the sound of the shofar, O my people.

SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR

Together we have celebrated the creation of the universe, the creations of nature, and the power of creation which is within each one of us.  We are the creators and co-creators of our lives, our world, and our future.  We have, each of us, a small power of creation like unto that of God.  Let us go forth from here reclaiming our ability to know good from evil.    We go forth as creative and powerful people, called again to serve only our highest callings, to come alive, to seek truth and to heal our world.  Please join me in our responsive benediction.  

RESPONSIVE BENEDICTION:

PREACHER: We leave this sacred time and place, 

PEOPLE: But we carry its promise with us.

PREACHER: The world needs the spirit that we can carry forth.

PEOPLE: Let us become the life, the truth and the healing that we seek.  

PREACHER: Amen.

PEOPLE: Amen.

Brian Ferguson
October 5, 2008

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