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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Amen.

 

SERMON:   Brokenness

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1 June 2008

Davidson Loehr

First UU Church of Austin, Texas

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.AustinUU.org

PRAYER:

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON: Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Hepburn
Sunday, May 25, 2008

Invocation:

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

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

Peace be with you.

Let us join together in song.

Prayer

How can we become more compassionate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon: Understanding Evangelical Christianity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benediction

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

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

Namaste.

Davidson Loehr
18 May 2008

PRAYER:

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinkers weren’t just ivory-tower eggheads, overeducated chatterers – look at some of the ways we describe ourselves! Mechanical, cold, condemning, not loving. But in Greece, thinkers