First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Sometimes things just work out. Take this sermon, for instance. When I was asked to do this service, I quickly decided to talk about a topic that I have been fascinated with for a long time: what does it mean to be great? I was on the phone with Sally Scott and she asked me if I could do this date or that date, and we settled on February 22nd. I thought nothing special about it at the time.

However, forty-five years ago I would have instantly made the connection between February 22nd and George Washington’s birthday, because his birthday was a school holiday. In fact, back in those days we also got February 12th off from school because it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Of course, as it turns out, Charles Darwin’s birthday is also February 12th, and the same year as Lincoln. But while they named a city after Darwin in Australia, there’s no way in America – except maybe for a few isolated Royal Blue areas – that we’d get Darwin’s birthday off from school.

We just marked the 200th anniversary of both Lincoln’s and Darwin’s birthdays. Washington would have been 277 today – a number of no special significance since it doesn’t have any “zeros” in it. Nonetheless, there is an interesting mathematical fact about Washington’s birth year of 1732. Put a decimal after the “1″ and you have the square root of three – 1.732. Really. See, you never know what you are going to learn at a Unitarian church. I don’t know if this numeric coincidence portended greatness for Washington – perhaps a numerologist could tell us – but he certainly demonstrated greatness during his lifetime. As did both Darwin and Lincoln.

Like I said, sometimes things just work out.

The word great, like the words love and God, is subject to many meanings and often fierce debate. I’m beginning to believe I am an intellectual masochist because I keep picking sermon topics that are impossible to fully discuss in a 20 – okay 25 – minute sermon. So let’s narrow our theme today. When I’m talking about greatness, I do not in any way mean famous. Famous and greatness are two totally different concepts and the cult of celebrity often worships people who are decidedly not very great, but whom we hoist onto pedestals made of fluff, and which are either unsteady and fragile or else we – and I mean American society – are shallow and fickle. But really, what are the odds of that being true about America?

And I don’t have the time to explore the really wonderful topic of the “greatness” of villains, for example Lord Voldemort, who J. K Rowling tells us over and over in her Harry Potter books, has done great things – terrible to be sure – but great nonetheless. So for purposes of my sermon, I assume that we would all agree that Lord Voldemort – and the real characters of history like him – do not deserve to be judged as having greatness. And based on her many interviews and pod casts, I think J. K. herself would approve.

Instead, I am going to use William Shakespeare’s famous quote about greatness from his play Twelfth Night as a template to discuss what it means to be great and how we judge greatness. And although there are many who could serve as examples, including many women, African-Americans, and others, because the powers that be handed it to me on a silver platter, I am going to be a bit of a Taoist and go with the flow by talking about each element of Shakespeare’s quote using Washington, Darwin, and Lincoln as examples.

In Twelfth Night the comedic plot begins when Malvolio, Countess Olivia’s priggish steward, comes upon a letter that the merrymakers in the play have left for him to find. The letter is a fake anonymous love letter that Malvolio believes is from Olivia. The writer of the letter suggests that Malvolio can become “great” by doing certain things, each of which is more absurd than the last. Never questioning the authenticity or the origin of the letter, Malvolio proceeds to carry out the ridiculous tasks, until Olivia thinks her steward has gone mad and has him locked up.

Contained in the letter, which Malvolio reads aloud, is the famous quote about greatness: “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Although Malvolio says these lines, he is reading from the letter, and audiences both then and now immediately recognize that the term “greatness” has very little to do with Malvolio, who is ambitious, pretentious, and has an ego that far outstrips his qualities as a person. He is blinded by pride, and is a ripe target for the prank being played upon him. He is so out of it that he cannot see just how far from reality his own self-musings have taken him.

I suppose that the ability to recognize one’s own folly is a necessary antecedent to being great. Which would lead one to conclude that people who think they are great very often are not. We have all known a super-confident person of whom we cannot understand where that confidence came from. Humility seems to be one of the hallmarks of greatness, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’d like to take a look at each of the elements of Shakespeare’s quote and see what we can glean from them.

The first part of the quote asserts that “some are born great.” This is one of the ultimate nature over nurture claims. The implication is that there are certain inherent qualities to being great and that they are manifest in the person from birth. But is it true? If we were in any mainstream Christian church today, the overwhelming answer would be yes, for there can be no better example in Western culture of someone who is believed to be born great than Jesus of Nazareth. When you are born god incarnate, that would seem to coincide with the notion of born greatness. I suppose that would apply to some other religious figures from other religious traditions as well.

But what about everybody else. Are any of them – us – born great? Well, the answer, of course, depends on what we mean by “great”, but overall, I tend to think the answer is a qualified yes. I tend to think that some people are simply born with certain talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, that put them ahead of the curve, so to speak, when it comes to doing great things and eventually, being thought of as having attained greatness. Of course, simply having those talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, is not a guarantee that they will be translated into greatness. In fact, like so many things, there are probably tons of false positives out there; that is, people who were born with the qualities, but never lived up to them, or worse, betrayed them in a hurtful or harmful way.

And in the category of things working out, I would suggest that if we are going to agree with Shakespeare that some are born great, then George Washington is one of those of whom we might say he was born great. I don’t intend to go into any history lessons here, so you can all relax. But listen to this. In an essay called “The Greatness of Washington,” Christopher Flannery says: “What Shakespeare is to poetry, Mozart to music, or Babe Ruth to baseball, George Washington is to life itself.” Now that is quite saying something. Flannery continues: “This is by no means to say that [Washington] was flawless any more than Babe Ruth was a perfect baseball player or Mozart a perfect musician. It is merely to say that, if he had not lived, such greatness could hardly have been believed possible.” Here we have the description of a man who was born to greatness and who, through his actions, character, and decisions, upheld his end of the bargain. And consider the words of Thomas Jefferson from today’s reading. Now, you’re supposed to say nice things at somebody’s funeral, but what Jefferson has to say is itself extraordinary and his reference to “nature and fortune” points to somebody who was born for greatness. But for me the coup de grace on the issue is the story of Washington and the cherry tree.

Mason Locke Weems wrote a biography of Washington shortly after Washington died and recounted the tale that as a lad, Washington got a new hatchet, and proceeded to test it by chopping down a cherry tree. When Washington’s father saw the tree, he asked George if he knew anything about it. George is reputed to have said: “I cannot tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

Now in recent decades, there has been much ado about humanizing Washington, indeed, all the founders of our country, and in so doing, demythologizing both the men and their accomplishments. And in this regard, it is pretty clear that the truth of the cherry tree tale lies somewhere between Santa Clause and the Lock Ness Monster. And although Washington gave all the credit to his mother, the point is that Weems was trying to tell everybody that Washington was an extraordinary man, whose greatness was manifest when he was a boy, and thus is an example for us of one who was born great – not perfect – but great. And at that level, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not.

The next part of Shakespeare’s quote is that “some achieve greatness.” The achievement of greatness suggests hard work, dedication, and the accomplishment of something that is unexpected, or at least something that was not evident or obvious in the person. And I think the unexpected part is important because it means going beyond who we (or others) think we are and making choices that expand rather than contract our embrace of the world at every level and in a good way. Let me explain.

We human beings use the power of flight as a metaphor for freedom. But when a bird flies, it is doing something that is as natural to it as walking is to us. We can marvel at the grace, speed, and power of a bird in flight, but we would never say that a bird has attained greatness simply because it can fly. It is expected that a bird can fly. I feel the same way about people and their abilities.

If you are six-foot-ten and can dunk, does that make you great? I don’t think so. You have great physical prowess and we will admire you for it, perhaps, but I would never say that you had achieved greatness just because you could dunk. Similarly, we admire and perhaps envy really intelligent people because of their brain power. But are those people great just because they can figure out Sudoku with relative ease. Again I say no. And I suggest the same thing even applies to the gods we worship. Simply because a god is powerful and can kill us, or in the case of Yahweh, destroy towns or even the whole world, I don’t think that god is automatically great. Powerful, yes. Scary, yes. But partaking of greatness? I don’t think so. At least not because of this.

Truth is, there is an important difference between something being great and something having a quality of greatness. I had been thinking for some time about this and it finally hit me: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. I’ll say that again: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. This may be obvious to some of you, but it was an interesting revelation to me. The Great Wall of China is great because it is huge and they say it can even been seen from space. But the greatness of the Chinese people who built that wall and their culture, now that is something that must be judged and ultimately bestowed. Barry Bonds’ record of 762 home runs is great; whether we would say that Bonds himself embodies greatness in the world of baseball is something that is being debated and will be decided by the judgment of history.

Which takes me full circle: achieving greatness means doing something worthy and that is unexpected of you, because if it was expected, it might be great in some measurable way, like a falcon that can dive at 278 miles per hour, but greatness, true greatness takes something more, something beyond what is expected, something that encompasses more than just ourselves, and something that others deem to be admirable, good, helpful, and perhaps even amazing.

With this in mind, I’d like to take just a minute to talk about Charles Darwin. Darwin was a reclusive man who spent almost his entire lifetime coming up with his theory of evolution by natural selection. His great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin, lives in Australia and was quoted in last Saturday’s edition of The Age as saying that “[Charles] never did an honest day’s work in his life.” What did he do? An almost preacher, Darwin spent all his time observing and collecting beetles and other critters and thinking about the origins of life on Earth. He spent many years ruminating about his already formed theory of evolution through natural selection, and it was only when he learned that somebody else – Alfred Russel Wallace – had come to the same conclusions that he published his Origin of Species.

Darwin was not the first to say that life had evolved. His own grandfather had come to that conclusion. Nor was he the first to claim to know the mechanism for speciation. Lamarck had put forward a theory of how one species morphed into another, famously stating that the giraffe evolved its long neck by stretching for leaves up in the trees, and then passing on the gain; but he got it wrong. Darwin, however, got both evolution and its mechanism right.

These were huge ideas that encompassed the entirety of life on Earth. And Darwin published and stood behind them at a time when doing so went against the great weight of society and culture – like so many who we call great, he courageously broke the mold. As Chris Darwin says, “Every age suppresses the unthinkable; Darwin expressed it.” And it is something Darwin was vilified for then and continues to be vilified for by some today. And it is for these reasons, and the fact that his theories, as they have been developed over the last century and a half, form the very foundation of modern biology, that he achieved the greatness that has been bestowed upon him.

The last part of Shakespeare’s quote is: “some have greatness thrust upon them.” And here I guess, I would have to quarrel a little bit with Shakespeare, although in matters of English usage, that’s probably a dangerous thing. While not as poetic, I would rather the quote had said “some have the opportunity for greatness thrust upon them.” Because I don’t think greatness can be thrust upon anybody. It is something that is earned – even if one is otherwise born for greatness – and not something that can be thrust upon one for the obvious reason that the thrust could just as easily cause the person to fail. What’s really going on here is that some are placed by fate, chance, destiny, or choice, in a position where the circumstances are so extraordinary, that if the person can handle them, can successfully weather the storm, and perhaps even achieve great things, then that person will be judged to be great.

Having greatness thrust upon one can, of course, be applied to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln ascended to the presidency after the ruinous Buchanan administration, and at the onset of the Civil War. He was literally thrust into a position of power just as the country was violently breaking apart and for four years had the weight of the fate of the nation on his shoulders. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and is credited with ending slavery and saving the Union.

In a recent poll of historians conducted by C-SPAN, Lincoln just topped Washington as the best president of the United States, while Buchanan was dead last and is, in every respect, somebody who the world tried its best to thrust greatness upon, but who failed miserably. In many ways it is no accident that Buchanan, the worst president, and Lincoln, voted the best, came back-to-back during the tumultuous years heading up to and including the Civil War.

Well, that takes care of Shakespeare’s quote – or does it? Because you may recall that the full quote starts out: “Be not afraid of greatness.” What are we to make of this? In my last few minutes I want to talk about this part of the quote because I think, frankly, it is the most important part of all.

The first question to ask is why would anybody be afraid of greatness? I mean, you’d think that being great would be, well, great. But, I think the answer is pretty obvious, actually. Consider the men and women whom you think have attained greatness, however measured and by whatever means. I would bet that the person lived large, with courage, took risks, assumed great responsibility beyond him or herself, and was original in thought and deed to the point of breaking the mold of society and culture. In all events, I would bet, they went beyond what was expected of them and reached out beyond themselves to impact the world for the better. Finally, I’d bet that many of them, at least, exhibited one more characteristic – a willingness to leave the pack behind, to take the lonely path, and often to create something for others, something that they themselves did not or could not share in but which they protected for the benefit of others – people we often call heroes.

And here, finally, is where we get to talk about hamsters. I’ll bet you were wondering about that. Being a bold hamster takes courage, you see, because while there may be food just around the corner, there could also be a snake or a large bird. And if I were a hamster, it would be difficult to be bold, difficult to take those steps or take those positions or take those stands that place one at risk, especially on behalf of others or an important idea. But that’s what great people do. That’s what makes them great. Now people aren’t hamsters, but I think the point of the analogy holds. And so we might ask ourselves, are we like the bold hamster, venturing forth despite the risk, or are we somebody who Shakespeare was talking to, somebody who holds back because of the fear that we are going to be the bold hamster who is soon lunch?

These are among the most serious issues we face in how we live our lives, despite my somewhat tongue-in-cheek analogy. Let’s face it: it is not likely that any of us are going to attain the greatness of the historical figures I talked about – or could have talked about – today. But so what? I believe there is a bit of bold hamster in all of us, enough at least that we can see the path. But I suspect most of us anyway also have a bit of that fear of greatness, of taking the next step along that very path that might lead to greatness – the greatness each of us is capable of achieving.

Part of the purpose of this church and our religion is to help us to grow beyond our comfort zones, to embrace more than what is in our little world, and to think seriously about the gods whom we serve and how well we serve them. I think we can all walk the path of greatness because we can all do something that is unexpected of us, that breaks our own mold, if not that of culture and society, is larger than we are, and reaches beyond ourselves to impact the world for the better.

And if that’s true, then how do we know if we are on the right track? I offer two observations. The first is pretty simple. One measure of how big we are on the inside is just how far and how large our embrace is on the outside. The larger the scope of our embrace outside – be it family, community, country, or cosmos – then the bigger we are on the inside and the higher the likelihood of greatness. But always remember, greatness is not something that we ourselves decide. Greatness is judged and bestowed by others. So here is the second test.

In the Wizard of Oz, after gifting the Tin Woodsman with a new heart, the wizard cautions him by saying: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” It’s the same with greatness, for greatness, like the heart, is not measured by the great things you have done, but by how much honest admiration and respect you are afforded by others, especially those who know you or who you have touched.

Martin Luther – the guy who started the Protestant Reformation – thought that the Epistle of James did not belong in the Bible because James teaches that “faith without works is dead,” whereas Luther believed that it is only by grace that people are saved by God. I’m on James’ side on this one. We are all given gifts by nature, we all have our dreams, our passions and our hopes for our lives and for the lives of our children, family, friends and others. Without action, without works, those gifts are wasted and our dreams and hopes nothing more than electrical impulses in our brains that will one day be silent and lost as a grain of sand upon an endless beach.

Let our greatness be to live fully and fearlessly, to use our gifts in the service of our best and most illuminating gods, and to embrace as much of life outside ourselves as we can, and like Lamarck’s famous giraffe, stretch our reach to encompass ever more, until we surprise even ourselves. And then let them judge how we have lived – those who have known us and those who we have touched – and they will nod a knowing nod and smile a knowing smile for greatness.

Presented February 22, 2009
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin
Revised for Print
Copyright 2009 by Jim Checkley.

And just because I know you’re dying to know, George W. Bush was 36th, or sixth from the bottom, just edging out Millard Fillmore and a touch behind John Tyler.

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Time to Change again

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

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Brian Ferguson
December 28, 2008
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Reading

Impassioned Clay
by Ralph N. Helverson

Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse.
Out of the passions of our clay it rises.
We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient,
self-sustaining or self-derived.

We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present,
some self-respect beyond our failures.
We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up
at beauty,
when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.
We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all
that we have received.

We have religion when we look upon people with all their
failings and still find in them good;
when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our
our own heart.

We have religion when we have done all that we can,
and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is
larger than ourselves.

Prayer

As we take this time, may we become in touch with the deepest desires of our hearts and memories of our minds. We are creatures with knowledge of our past and hopes for the future.

In recalling our past may we find the humility to learn from both our failures and success. In anticipating our future may we find the strength and courage to challenge ourselves to become more of what we desire to be.

As the adversities of our life remind us of our illusions of control and delusions of independence, may they also remind us of those who can help us and our interdependence with others.

In times of our greatest vulnerability and uncertainty, may we remember the moments of our highest resolve. And in doing so may our life be the embodiment of our highest ideals and an inspiration to all around us.

Amen.

Sermon: Time to Change – again!

As we approach the end of the calendar year, I find myself thinking about that difficult subject of time. The year 2009 is almost upon us and I am one of those people who hasn’t quite got their mind around being in the 21st century and soon we will be in the second decade of it. But when I talk about the difficulty of time I do not just mean the speed with which it goes by or the seeming shortage of time.

I have that constant struggle I have to live in the present. My mind constantly planning ahead to the short term task ahead, like eating lunch, or longer term out to next year, “where am I going to get a job?” When not thinking about the future then I think about my decisions of the past the good ones, a year ago I really didn’t think I’d be living in Texas, or regrets, why did I think this would be a good sermon topic? My mind seems to make only fleeting visits to the present before concerning itself with thoughts for the future and memories of the past.

Midnight on Wednesday as the calendar flips to another year there will be that mixture of poignancy for the past along with hope and perhaps some anxiety for the time ahead. For some of us we will be happy to see the back of 2008 for the hardship and losses we endured. For others we will reflect on a year well-lived and enter the New Year filled with anticipation and optimism. Many of us enter the New Year with externally imposed changes which we had little control over.

As I consider my own situation as intern minister here I am in the middle of my year internship while simultaneously ending it here at First Austin and about to begin a new stage at the Liveoak church. I now understand Jean Luc Godard’s phrase “A story should have a beginning, middle, and an end but not necessarily in that order.” My current situation is simultaneously a beginning, middle and an end. Time is a tricky concept.

The end of a calendar year also imposes on our lives transition points, often artificially, as work contracts and projects end or deadlines imposed by the Christmas season itself. The busyness of the Christmas season can also become such a focus for many of us that it becomes difficult to plan for the time after until we get through Christmas. At this time between Christmas and New Year is when we have the time and energy to take measure of the past and look towards the future.

The month of January is a somewhat arbitrary beginning for a new year since it does not correspond to the beginning of an agricultural season or astronomical cycle. The month of January is named after the Roman God Janus, who had two faces which allowed him to simultaneously look forward to the future and backwards to the past. The tradition of New Year resolutions is also traced to the God Janus and when taken seriously New Year resolutions are about looking at our behaviors of the past and envisioning how we could do better in the future.

As individuals many of us in small ways or perhaps even in significant ways undertake the tradition of New Year resolutions. The most common resolutions are: losing weight, getting fit, eating better, quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol, paying off debt, spending more time with the family, volunteering to help others more, and just being less grumpy. Some of these might be useful goals for many of us. And probably very similar goals to last year, and the year before and the year before that. Or perhaps that is just me. I actually thought that I might take up smoking just so that I could give it up thus fulfilling at least one resolution this year.

Of course the joke of so much of New Year resolutions is how little time it takes to fail in keeping them and how we desire the same changes each year. There is a whole industry around this such as gym membership which sky-rockets in January as the next cycle of resolutions for weight loss and greater fitness begin. While the idea of New Year resolutions can be shrugged off as just another silly example of human nature and the large disconnect between our spoken desires and our actual behavior, I do think the idea touches on a real desire for many of us to live better than we have done and the great difficulty we have in doing so.

Our Unitarian tradition of the 19th and 20th Century has focused on the self-improvement of the person and has been summarized as “Salvation by Character”.

Salvation in our Unitarian tradition was about individuals improving themselves and working towards their own and others moral improvement. We moved the emphasis from a faith in and obedience to a God to an emphasis on improving ourselves to become better, more ethical people, and this improvement was often expressed as becoming more God-like. The 19th Century Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing said “To honor God, is to approach God as an inexhaustible Fountain of light, power, and purity. It is to feel the quickening and transforming energy of his perfections. It is to thirst for the growth and invigoration of the divine principle within us, and to seek the very spirit of God which proposes as its great end the perfection of the human soul.”

Now I think it is fair to say that most people do not think of their New Year resolutions as the perfecting of the human soul. Yet in their own way, New Year resolutions are about becoming a better person – physically, emotionally or even spiritually – tomorrow than you were yesterday. I wonder if the reason we do not take our resolutions or other desires to change seriously is that we do not aim high enough with our demands on ourselves? The desire for human improvement in our Unitarian tradition led to a great emphasis on the education of people. This belief is still strong in our movement with our strong support and belief in public education for all people.

For example, our split the plate donation today is going towards the American-Nepali Student and Women’s Educational Relief organization. This group, which we will support with half of our offering from today’s service, supports 12-15 years of education for children from the lower castes in Nepal. Our tradition of human improvement and belief in education has taken on a global perspective today, showing a growing focus for our social justice work that is in keeping with our religious tradition. As someone who was the first generation of my family to attend college I know of the transformative effects and opportunities that an education provides.

Religion for many of us is about the transformation of the individual and our society for the better. Transformation for individuals comes generally as a result of an interaction of external circumstances and our internal motivations. Many people come into our religious community desiring change in their lives perhaps by seeking a community where they can pursue spiritual questions, engage in social justice work, or find meaning for the changes their lives. All these can be acts of transformation.

The struggle many of us have in enacting transformations within ourselves is how we go from often vague desires for change into more firm beliefs until we engrain these beliefs as habits. I learned something about this struggle during my chaplaincy training last year where I was working with military veterans who had mental health concerns and addictions. By the time I was working with them many had reached a crisis in their life due to their addiction and were desperate for help.

There was a common pattern where there was a tendency for them to either blame everyone else or blame themselves for all of their problems. Much of the work I did was to explore where the blame should belong then encourage them to take the appropriate responsibility for their actions. Through the 12-step program of alcoholics anonymous there was a strong group support for the patient and the encouraging of humility in admitting the need of help from a higher power.
For many of the people I worked with they had admitted they were powerless to resist alcohol and chose to replace their addiction with a healthier, higher power which often gave them strength to address their addiction.

The major lesson I learned from these veterans was how they struggled with their addiction everyday. As one of them said to me “The difficulty is not to stop drinking but to stay sober every day. Stopping drinking isn’t hard. Not starting again is.” The discipline of choosing everyday not to drink alcohol for them was a huge act of self-control and I believe it to be a spiritual discipline.

In our Liberal Religious tradition much of our religion is to guide us in how we should act and how we should make decisions.

I see a commonality between how our religion guides us to enact changes in our own lives and how those in 12-Step programs were attempting to help people address their addictions. To take a vague desire of how I wish to be different and change it into a belief that I will act on a daily requires a commitment from me and the support of my community which holds me accountable. Enacting these beliefs in my words and actions is a daily spiritual discipline I engage in and often fail at.

As I fail at living up to my beliefs I am fortunate that the consequences are not as severe as those with addictions who I served as a chaplain to. I deal with my disappointment, reflect on why I failed to live to my expectations then begin the cycle again.

By letting go of any attachment towards any need of perfection and just focus on improvement allows me to show compassion to myself and stay engaged in changing my beliefs and habits. This model of action, reflection, and action with consistent emphasis on improvement not perfection is a simple yet significant approach for me to enact change in my life. For many Unitarian Universalists it can be hard for us to settle for simple improvement and not obsess about perfection. It is said that, “The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy. The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time.” In this vein I want to share with you a resolution I arrived at that guides much of my life.

There is a lot of talk, at least among seminarians with too much spare time, that we really need to find some guiding principles to help us in daily life. Of course, I undertook up this project with serious intellectual rigor hoping to arrive at some weighty, profound ethical principal. In truth, the outcome for me was on the surface a disappointment. My guiding principle is that I only want to make brand new mistakes.

The satisfaction of making the same mistake as others is a shallow, frustrating consolation and I don’t want to make the same mistakes as others by reinventing another broken wheel. By not wanting to the mistakes of the past then I learn from history and by accepting that I am going to make mistakes, albeit new ones, allows me to move forward into unknown areas and overcome the fear of failure. I have actually found this seemingly superficial guiding principle of only making new mistakes quite liberating.

This thinking may also be beneficial for organizations such as a religious community. Organizations seem to settle into a common behavioral pattern which prevents change and seems to condition any new person to conform to the expected behavior of the organization. Yet if the goal of religion is individual and community growth then we want an organizational structure that encourages change of individuals and renewal of the organization itself not stifle transformations.

A community that learns from the past and takes risks moving forward will make brand new mistakes by pushing boundaries. Hesitancy and resistance to change are understandable but limiting. If we wish to make brand new mistakes then we have to overcome our resistance to change as individuals and as a religious community. What is so bad about a mistake – especially one that no-one has made before?

As adults we become very conscious of what others think of us and we often do not wish to appear less than competent. Ask a group of Kindergarden children if they can sing or can dance then almost all of them would raise their hand enthusiastically and they would be very keen to show you. As we get older, our inhibitions seem to set in and our desire to try new activities or approaches diminishes. We encourage children to make mistakes and to learn. We develop for them compassionate boundaries for them to push against and we support them in their struggles and failures.

As adults we lose the ability to appear vulnerable or fallible. I feel we limit ourselves by not allowing ourselves to make mistakes. As the poem Suzy read earlier said “We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived. We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.”

There is a myth of competency we wish to project. Yet I think most of us have learned more from our mistakes than our successes. Those times we pushed ourselves into unknown areas, further than we intended beyond our comfort zone. By doing so we grow as people as we break down those barriers we have raised for ourselves or others attempted to impose on us.

Mistakes are almost a prerequisite for growth and success. Michael Jordan, the great basketball player, said “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

I would venture to say that perhaps the only real failure is to not attempt something that you really wish to do. When we think about our own life then we rarely regret what we did do, – now I’m only talking about legal activities here – our major regrets are those times where we did not do something when we had opportunity. Even when our efforts do not work out then we generally learn something, even if the lesson was to never to do that again. When we choose not to even attempt something for fear of failure then our learning opportunity is missed.

Of course to accept the possibility of our making a mistake involves us being willing to take a risk. The following words from the poem “To Risk” capture much of our struggles concerning our aversion to risk.

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk exposing our true self.
To place our ideas – our dreams – before the crowd is to risk loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
To live is to risk dying.

I would say that all of these actions – to laugh, weep, reach out, dream, to love, to hope, to try – are acts of coming alive and truly living. They all involve a risk but a risk of what – appearing foolish or sentimental, not being loved, exposing our true feelings. These may be sources of discomfort but are not character flaws. By growing from and beyond our failures and mistakes, we are coming alive to all of life’s possibilities. With knowledge of the past and imagination for the future we can make our whole life be a spiritual practice -breaking down the artificial barriers between the secular and the sacred, between ourselves and others. In doing this we awaken our soul to the excitement and nourishment of the complete spiritual life.

——————-

Cassara, Ernest Biography of Hosea Ballou http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/hoseaballou.html Last accessed on December 27, 2008

Channing, William Ellery, Likeness to God: William Ellery Channing Selected Writing Robinson, David ed., (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) p.156

Hansel, Tim, Eating Problems for Breakfast (Word Publishing, 1988) p.39 quote from Edwin Bliss

Anonymous. To Risk Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993) #658

Posted in Audio available, Brian Ferguson | Comments Off

Can Christmas have any meaning for us?

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

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Brian Ferguson
December 21, 2008
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Reading -
For So The Children Come
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show
where to find the babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night
Fathers and mothers–
sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.
They ask, ‘Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?’
Each night a child is born is a holy night–
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshipping.

Prayer

These are the words of Eusebius, the 3rd Century Christian Bishop

May I be no one’s enemy and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides.
May I wish for every person’s happiness and envy none.
May I never rejoice in the ill fortune of one who has wronged me.
May I, to the extent of my power, give needful help to all who are in want.
May I never fail a friend.
May I respect myself.
May I always keep tame that which rages within me.
May I accustom myself to be gentle and never be angry with others because of circumstances.
May I know good people and follow in their footsteps.
Amen

Reading

“Christ Climbed Down”
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candy canes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
through a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30 with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Sermon – Brian Ferguson

Here we are four days before Christmas and we are in the aftermath of a divisive church conflict regarding the dismissal of our minister. Everyone seems to be hurting.

I know I am moving between emotions of sadness, anger, and confusion. It is not a good place to be. The future looks uncertain, many are disillusioned about our church community, and most of us are still trying to make sense of what just happened over the last month. Christmas time is where the dominant religious culture and dominant secular culture are telling us is a time of joy and celebration. I am not feeling much joy and celebration right now.

Christmas is often a time when we Unitarian Universalists turn to our Christian roots. There is a certain irony to this since for most Christians, Easter has a far greater religious significance than Christmas. Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus which demonstrates the divinity of Jesus. Christmas on the hand is very much a story about the humanity of Jesus since it is a celebration of his birth and the hope his birth symbolizes. I am feeling all too human right now and the powerlessness that involves. Hope is something which would be helpful at this time.

The religious message of hope often gets lost amidst the secular aspects of Christmas that the poem I read earlier somewhat cynically described – “the tinsel Christmas trees, the plastic babe in a manger, and the North Pole saint in a red flannel suit with a fake white beard.” Not much sign of hope there. These images of Christmas are so familiar to us from television, shopping malls, and the front yard of our neighbors – or perhaps if we are honest even our own front yards – yes confession time in the UU church. I warned you we would be going back to our Christian roots.

Despite the rampant commercialization of Christmas there is an important religious message to some Christians and it is perhaps the most important aspect of our Christian heritage that we Unitarian Universalists continue to embrace. That is the idea of the incarnation. The divine embodied in flesh is the literal meaning. Incarnation is the idea of the divine being active in the material world in human form. In Christianity this figure was Jesus Christ who came to communicate a message of salvation to people therefore took human form.

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors embraced the idea of incarnation very seriously and reached some radical conclusions. Incarnation to them meant our highest ideals are embodied into our human form and become an active presence in our world through our own actions. The 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing says “Jesus came, not only to teach with his lips, but to be a living manifestation of his religion – to be, in an important sense, the religion itself. Christianity is a living, embodied religion. It is example and action” This is a call to us to live out our values actively in our lives – to be the incarnation of our values in our world.

Thinking of Jesus in these terms helps me understand the Christian idea of the Church as the Body of Christ. This term can be confusing but I find it helpful in thinking about our religious community being infused and guided by high ideals and moral values. The mission statement of our church reads: “As an inclusive religious and spiritual community, we support each individual’s search for meaning and purpose, and join together to help create a world filled with compassion and love.” Just as some believe that spiritual energy brings alive the material body of a person, our religious community is brought alive by the high spiritual ideas and morals of our mission. Without such ideas we are just a physical building and social group not a church.

In thinking of our church here in Austin as a body it is fair to say our particular body right now is feeling battered, bruised, and broken. It is difficult to find the infusion of high spiritual ideals as we assess where we are as a community. In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the local congregation has the power to call and dismiss a minister. There is no hierarchical power structure that imposes ministers on congregations as in some religions. The right of a congregation to call any minister of their choosing is a great strength of our movement and has allowed us to be the first religion to call women, gay, and transgender ministers. This is an aspect of our history that we are rightly very proud of. The shadow side of this congregational power is the conflict and divisiveness that can occur within a congregation around the dismissal of a minister. Sadly, this latter case has been so clearly demonstrated to us in the last few weeks.

We are in a time of great pain, uncertainty, and confusion as a religious community. We have voted to dismiss our senior minister, and our future is uncertain. There is pain about the loss of our minister, pain about the process leading up to the vote, and pain about the divisions in our community. I personally have a pain that is beyond the disappointment of losing a colleague and supervisor. I have a pain that is an injury of the soul. My spiritual wound is due to our religious community losing touch with the core elements of our mission such as compassion and love in the turmoil of the last few weeks. I look around our community and see great hurt amongst people on all sides of the vote. I am also pained as valued members of our community leave wounded by the events of recent weeks.

I heard and read statements about the senior minister and members of the board of trustees that I found offensive and disrespectful, and believe such statements should have had no place in any community let alone a religious one. This pained me deeply. We have a right to free speech and to disagreement, in fact they are at the core of our Liberal Religious movement, but we also have a responsibility to exercise those rights respectfully and for the greater good of our community. The value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not a value that is turned on at our convenience. Such values are principles we are called to follow and may be most important when we engage with those who we are in disagreement with.

Some people who supported dismissal told me that they feel they now have their church back. Others who wished to retain the minister say they feel they have lost their church and plan to leave our community. I would remind both groups an important yet often unrecognized aspect of our Liberal Religious Tradition – You only lose this church if you choose to leave it. The church as a community is still here and hopefully always will be. We do not exclude people because of how they voted, what they believe, or have creeds you must conform to before you can join.

For those who have come back because they feel they have their church back I caution them that is a different church today than the one they recall from their past. Churches like physical bodies are organic institutions which change over time as new people come in, bringing their energy and vitality forever changing our community. This is a very good thing. For those who feel they have recently lost their church, it is true the church they experienced before the conflict is no longer with us. It is said that forgiveness is the giving up of any hope of a better past. I would suggest that the church of the past for all of us is gone. We cannot unring the bell.

We must attempt to heal our present wounds and begin envisioning what church we want to be in the future. To begin healing we must understand the mistakes we made in the past and why recent events have caused so much hurt in our community. I sympathize with the frustration and sadness that leads people to want to leave a church. We have high expectations of people in our religious community, be they our minister, board members, committee chairs, office staff, other members, or even our ministerial intern. We are all human and often fail to live up to the values as we would wish to.

When wounded in our lives, many of us turn to our religious community for healing. When a part of our religious community is the cause of our wounds then we struggle to believe our church can be a part of our healing. I believe a spiritual injury needs spiritual healing. Perhaps the healing can happen in another religious community but I would suggest the healing might be more whole, more complete if it occurs within the religious community that caused the injury?

The great 16th Century Unitarian Francis David said “We do not need to think alike to love alike.” We hear these words so often in our Unitarian Universalist churches that the profoundness of them can become lost.
These words are so much easier said than acted upon. In the recent turmoil in our church, these words occurred to me often but sadly too often in the violation rather than the observance of the sentiment. We claim that we wish a diversity of opinions and then when we disagree on a major issue we seem to quickly fall out of right relationship with each other. Perhaps the problem is many of us join our movement because “we want to be around people who think like we do.” When a point of disagreement comes up in our community then our relationship with each other can quickly sour and we are at a loss about how to repair it.

As most of us know from our most intimate relationships, a relationship based on love is no guarantee of agreement on all things and avoidance of conflict. Apologies to any new lovers out there! A relationship based on love is a commitment to stay in relationship and work out the difficulties in a mutually beneficial way if possible.

Both our religious connection to our church and our intimate relationships can grow stronger as we work through our differences and conflicts. Being around people who have the same opinions as us is certainly comfortable and supportive but only limited growth can occur. I believe we grow more when we are in community with people who challenge us and are willing to stay in relationship with us as we differ in our thoughts. We can all grow spiritually through this challenge.

One of our duties as members of this religious community is to hold each other accountable for our actions, values and opinions by calling us to embody these values in our actions. I believe Davidson attempted to hold us accountable to these high ideals through his sermons. I believe the board thought they were acting to hold ministerial leadership accountable to our higher values. Many members of our congregation attempted to hold our leadership accountable to values of fairness and openness in recent weeks. These were all good aspects of what happened in the last few weeks.

I believe the failure of our community in the last few weeks is where we fell out of love, respect, and compassion with those we disagree with or were in conflict with. We stopped living our mission by failing to act with compassion and love towards those we disagreed with. Reasonable people can disagree on issues, and disagreeing respectfully is possible. A chasm developed between groups within us where listening stopped as the voices became louder.

There was a dehumanizing of people on all sides of this issue that was heartbreaking for me to witness. I also feel complicit in this since I did too little to stop it. I regret my failure not to do enough to address the dehumanizing words and actions I witnessed on all sides. For example I was talking to a ministerial colleague from another church yesterday who was disgusted by us having many of the documents available through our public website. I too was troubled by this but did not address it Damage was done not only to our church but our movement.

We all probably can think of areas we should have address or things we did differently. Our views became entrenched which limited our imagination to see a greater range of possibilities for the process and how our actions impacted others. I think much of our pain is that we know in our hearts we could have done so much better.

To return to the earlier analogy of the Church as a body: prior to the board’s request for Davidson’s dismissal, a large portion of this community saw our church body as healthy, vibrant, and happy. The request for dismissal and build-up to the congregational meeting showed that much of the body of religious community was injured and in pain. There was a disappointment for many of us that we were unaware of the true feelings of our friends and fellow members of our own religious community. This painful realization that what we thought was a community of health was really a community of brokenness and this was a shock to many.

In looking at how we heal and move forward, I am trying to find sources of hope. One hope I find is that we were not failed by our values but our failure to live up to our values. We often failed to stay in relationship with those we disagree with – to love those that did not think like us.

I have had people on all sides of the issues talk to me trying to find meaning in what happened and seeking to understand their own pain and the pain of others. An honest seeking to understand the pain of others is a sign of hope. The need to be in fellowship with those who share our view is understandable and may be needed in providing emotional support.

The beginning of healing in our community I believe begins with each of us getting together with those having differing opinions and listening to them. Not trying to argue our point or find reasons to dismiss what they are saying, but listening to them to understand why others have the feelings they do. Hopefully if we listen to them they may reciprocate by listening to us. We will hear why people with similar information as us believed, acted, and reached conclusions very different from our own.

Perhaps we may understand most of us were acting in what we believed to be the common good for our religious community. Out of this may grow that seed of respect and though this is not quite the same as loving those who think differently from us, it has the potential to grow there. And at least we will be back in right relationship with others and moving forward. I wish us all well on this difficult journey and hope that we can all be a part of the important work we need to do. As we move towards the Christmas holiday and look forward to our future together may the following words of Howard Thurman hold all of us with love:

When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the family,
to make music in the heart.

May we all find the music we need for our hearts at this time and through our actions may we be the incarnation of our highest values of love and compassion in this world. And in doing so let us do the healing, rebuilding, and bringing of peace that our community and our world desperately needs.

———————

Channing, William Ellery, The Imitablness of Christ’s Character: The Works of William Ellery Channing Vol.IV (Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1903) p.135

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Is Courage Ever Enough?

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

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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 brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? 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 taken from Marianne Williamson)

HOMILY: Is Courage Ever Enough?

This is at least the third time in twenty years that I’ve written a sermon inspired by a famous line from Anais Nin. She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Something about those nine words is wonderfully appealing, and seems profoundly right. You can think of times when fear made you shrink, and courage expanded you in a hundred ways:

– You were afraid to ask someone you really liked for a date, then finally got the courage to do it and now here you are.

–You were afraid to try something – trying out for a team or a play or a choir. If you never got the courage up to try, you may still wonder what you missed, how your memory of yourself might have been enlarged if you had just mustered up the courage.

– You finally applied for the school or the job you wanted, and you got it. Or even if you didn’t get it, you know you did the most you could do, and there’s comfort there: a comfort that wouldn’t be there if you’d never taken the risk.

You can multiply the list from your own life, but we can all think of times when courage absolutely seemed to expand our life, and fear shrank it.

So it’s easy to say Yes, that colorful French woman was right – life certainly does shrink and expand according to our courage.

And that word “courage” is interesting in its own right. It comes from a French word meaning “heart.” Reacting to something from the heart feels like we’re coming from a strong place, and that can expand life too, for ourselves and those whose lives we touch – because we can feel the difference.

We actually just heard a beautiful example of this a few minutes ago, in Benjamin Britten’s lovely Ceremony of Carols. There is a footnote to those carols that appears in many program notes for their performance. Besides being one of the 20th century’s great composers, Britten was also a political radical, a gay man, and a conscientious pacifist, opposed to all war. It was tougher to be those things seventy years ago. When England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Britten and his partner left England and moved to the United States. He had good success here, but two and a half years later it became a matter of principle for him to return to England. He returned home in March and April 1942, in a five-week North Atlantic crossing right in the middle of the war. Britten couldn’t have known what would happen to him on his return. He would at least be met with great hostility, and he could have been put in prison.

I can’t imagine what Britten must have felt like during the five dangerous weeks crossing the North Atlantic to return home to an England, always in danger of being sunk by German U-boats. And he wasn’t traveling in anything like first class, or any class. He was cooped up near some large machines that put out a constant roar, high temperatures, and very noxious smells. Right there is where and when he composed the Ceremony of Carols we’ve just heard. The music is so lovely and lively it sounds like it couldn’t possibly have come from that setting. But it didn’t come from the bowels of a ship; it came from his heart – his “cour,” his courage – as his decision to return home also did. Britten was finally accepted back into his country, and this composition from his heart certainly expanded his life, and the lives of thousands like us, still to come. It is a tribute to our music director Brent Baldwin’s great perspicacity that he chose that music long before I had any idea what I was going to be talking about today.

Now you can see that it would be easy to do riffs on words like “heart” and “courage” all morning. But I want to leave the surface level of those wonderful nine words and look a little deeper, because there is another level at which something is wrong with just saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. Something is wrong, something is missing, it just isn’t that simple, and I think the whole saying is backwards. Courage isn’t enough, and isn’t what really makes life expand. That’s what I want to look at this morning. In fact, I think Anais Nin missed the most important point, or just assumed a much simpler picture than life really offers.

So I want to retrace the steps that led me down this provocative path and bring you along with me.

I first started thinking about our movie superheroes, and that we really create them as people who are so strong that they don’t have to be afraid of anybody. It’s that strength that lets them always do the right thing, as we wish we could too. So we project our need for courage onto them, then identify with them as they run, fly or rocket around battling the forces of evil. We think that if only we had the strength of Superman, or the agility and the wonderful gadgets of Batman or Ironman, then the courage part would be easy. So we think OK, it’s courage plus strength. Or courage plus strength plus a lot of cool gadgets.

But that’s not right either, because what sets these superheroes apart really isn’t their strength, cleverness or courage. After all, the supervillains are always pretty well matched with them. Lex Luthor, The Joker and Ironman’s many enemies were brilliant, also had clever gadgets, and weren’t afraid of anything not even superheroes. They had all the courage and strength you could hope for. But their courage didn’t make life expand.

Then I thought, Well OK, but everybody knew the supervillains were wrong. They were just obviously evil characters, like Lone Rangers from the Dark Side: aberrations, Bad Seeds.

But when we push it farther, that simple picture doesn’t hold together either. We have read or seen videos on YouTube of the families of young men or women in Iraq or Palestine who gave their lives to their cause by strapping bombs to their chest then killing themselves and as many strangers as they could. Their families, their communities, often even their religious leaders praise them as martyrs and heroes, not villains. You can say Well, they live in this closed little world where their beliefs are like a house of mirrors, repeating back to them only their own biases, and they’ve been taken in. Their courage has been seduced, we say. But you know they’re saying the same thing about us. It’s complex. It’s about more than courage. Life shrinks and expands not just in proportion to our courage, but also in proportion to the size and inclusiveness of our vision and our heart.

It isn’t courage that makes life expand. It’s courage in the service of high and noble ideals that makes life expand; courage in the service of coming alive, seeking truth, and healing the world.

Courage is the ability to take action. But whether that action expands or shrinks life depends on whether the spirits we serve are good or bad: whether we’re serving the angels of our better nature, or the angels of our worst nature. And how are we to know?

There is no foolproof way, but there’s a famous formula from a third-century theologian I’ve always loved as one of the best guides for people of good heart (Origen, c. 185-254). Our course of action, he said, must always meet two criteria. It must both be useful to us, and at the same time worthy of God. Because life also shrinks and expands in proportion to the size of the god we are serving.

(As a kind of scholastic footnote, Origen used this two-part test to determine whether you were interpreting Scripture rightly, though I think using it to determine whether you’re interpreting life rightly is a fair extension of his intent.)

Now you might want to argue that the families of those human bomb people would say the murder of their enemies was worthy of God. But the most revered thinkers in any religion, including Islam, don’t say that. Only the religious hacks praise murder; the more mature and nuanced say that unless our actions are guided by love and compassion, they are not worthy of God, period. When tactics are brutal or dehumanizing, we have already lost the ability to claim that they were good.

Many of you read a perfect example of this in the national news just two days ago, in a closing chapter to the O.J. Simpson saga that has been going on for fourteen years. On Friday, Las Vegas Judge Jackie Glass sentenced Simpson to a minimum of nine years in prison. Simpson tried to argue that he never meant to hurt anybody, he just wanted to recover his personal things, including his slain wife’s wedding ring. In other words, he was saying that what he did was not only useful to him, but also decent and noble, the sort of thing God would like. The judge pointed out that when he took a gun and accomplices, when he kidnapped and threatened people, his actions put the lie to his words. Once he adopted those tactics, he lost all claim to good intent. If we have a conscience at all, we know the difference. It’s one of the things about us that we have to be able to count on for a legal system to work, for juries to work, for anything to work. We know the difference.

It’s never as simple as saying that life expands in proportion to our courage. In every case – from superheroes and supervillains to suicidal bombers or the latest installment in the O.J. Simpson saga, it’s a similar lesson. Life expands in proportion to our courageous service of healthy and life-giving ideals, nothing less. It’s like another metaphor I’ve used here before, about the two wolves. A boy went to his grandfather for advice, saying he was often torn between wanting to do whatever he thought he could get away with, and what he knew was really right. Yes, the grandfather admitted, he had always had those same two voices in him. He thought of them as two wolves, each fighting to define his soul. One urged him to use his strength, courage and cleverness to get away with whatever he could, and the other would accept only fair and caring actions. All his life, the grandfather said, these two wolves have been fighting to own him, to steer his soul. When the boy asked which wolf wins, the old man said, “The one that I feed, my son – the one that I feed.”

Whether we think of these competing spirits as two wolves or as the angels of our better and worse natures, it matters tremendously which one we choose to feed, because only one of them – only one of them — has the power to expand life.

Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr | Comments Off

Religion and Economics

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

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Reading:

excerpt from Sin, Evil, and Economics

by contemporary Christian Theologian Sallie McFague.

Thanks to technologies of communication, transportation, and commerce, the world of the twenty-first century is more deeply interconnected than ever before, and it is increasingly clear that the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism. Not everyone chooses to recognize the primacy of that language, and some speak defiantly in other tongues, but there can be little argument that it has become the global discourse with which all others must contend. It is the defining myth of our time.

While we each have choices to make about the degree to which we will “buy into” the myth, practically no one on earth has the freedom to opt out altogether. It is that pervasive and that powerful. And at the heart of capitalism, I have argued, is the exact dynamic of freedom and bondage as described by the famous Christian theologian Augustine’s theory of evil. Capitalism assumes that we are creatures of desire, and it stokes our desire for lesser goods to the point of addiction, finally rendering us powerless to opt out of its dynamic.

What would it mean, after all, to get “outside” of capitalism in today’s world? Even those who want nothing to do with it, who view it as the pinnacle of Western corruption or imperialism, or whose minds and bodies bear the scars of its excesses and exclusions, are nevertheless pulled into its captivating influence.

Strangely, while market capitalism began with a classic Christian view of humanity based on selfish greed—the basis for the allocation of scarce resources and the eventual “trickle down” of prosperity for all in the twenty-first century—it has eventuated in a näive, optimistic, narrow, and undifferentiated view of sin and evil. Classical economic theory claims that the very core of who we are—individuals motivated by insatiable desire for more and more goods—is the basis from which to build the good life for all. From the selfish desires of billions of human beings turning the earth’s resources into goods for sale, prosperity for all will presumably come eventually.

This vision of the good life, however, neglects two huge facts: the just distribution of the earth’s resources as well as the limits of these resources. We now know that these matters are not mysteriously taken care of by the “invisible hand” of economics; on the contrary, the insatiable greed of billions of human beings causes horrendous injustice to other creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as undermining the sustainability of the planet itself.

But market capitalism does not deal with the tragic dimensions of sin and evil; its view of sin is narrow and viewed only as a sin against God, even though the implication of unregulated greed results in sin against neighbor and nature. By bracketing sin within the limits of the violation of God’s will, it eliminates from view the massive evil that our individual choices have created for others on planet Earth.

Prayer

The following are the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.

Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, nd of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.

Amen

Sermon – Religion and Economics

With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, there is now the seasonal tumble into the Christmas holidays. This past Friday apparently marks the beginning of the Christmas season, a beginning marked by shopping rather than any religious significance or perhaps shopping is religion for some people.

The media attempts to whip up excitement about the beginning of the Christmas shopping season as if it is some sort of race or competition. The mantra seems to be “they who buy the most present wins.” We are told about the must-have goods this season and the so-called bargains to be had. Those of us with children have already been barraged for a few weeks about the gifts our children want. A list that seems ever-changing – or perhaps I missed the point and my daughter’s new requests were additions to her list of desires and not replacements. I might have a very disappointed daughter this Christmas as she receives only one of her many requests.

Looking for someone to blame for these endless requests for presents, I blame at the media. Then I realize that my five year old daughter is too young to read and she doesn’t watch television but she has this remarkably impressive communication network which keeps her supplied with all the information about the latest hip toys. This week I read an article where a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had asked the Toy industry to cut back on its marketing to children due to the severe economics hardships which are particularly affecting families.

The Toy industry Association’s response was a firm defense of current marketing practices by asserting that children “are a vital part of the gift selection process.” It appears to me the toy industry association sees children as their most effective and certainly most persistent sales people. So begins the child on their life-long role as consumers. With little regulation of advertising to children then we leave the individual parents battling the massive forces of advertising in a David and Goliath battle where we have taken the sling slot away from David and given it to Goliath.

While the creation of desire for some product by advertising and the resulting peer pressure is most noticeable in children, I think most of us are affected by it. The philosopher and environmentalist, Max Oelschlaeger, says “In so-far as Americans have a collective identity it is as the consumer who lives amid unprecedented material choice and the worker who bends the earth to our virtually unrestrained human purpose.”

Even in difficult economic times as we are experiencing now then consumerism permeates our society in so many ways it creates values and purpose for many people. James Luther Adams, the 20th century Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. He says “The question concerning faith is not, shall I be a person of faith? The proper question is, rather, which faith is mine? For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts confidence in something. Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you’ve found his religion.” In listening to these words today, it appears to me that money, material possession, and our roles as consumers are defining meaning and value for many in our society therefore fulfills many of the roles of religion.

Our economic system through consumerism and advertising is a powerful perhaps dominant cultural force in our lives today. Yet as we reminded in the reading from Melita earlier, it is based on individual self-interest which unless we control it is just the contemporary reincarnation of the sin of greed. While Economics is often thought of as the study of money and financial systems, it is really a study of human decision-making for the allocation of limited resources. Economics is about how we deal with scarcity and limits with money being an important mechanism to determine the allocation of resources “efficiently”. Sometimes I find it hard to think of money as merely a tool in our lives since so often it seems like a goal in itself. We choose our jobs based on it, plan our retirements around it, and it places very real limitations on the lives of most of us.

Some people say that money makes the world go around. Another view is that money doesn’t make the world go around, but having it makes the journey much more pleasant. Regardless money is important in our society and necessary to meet many of our basic needs. But money can become an obsession for us as we desire more than necessary for their basic needs and distorting what is most important in our lives. All of the major religions caution us to beware of money becoming an idol or a false God, yet religious institutions walk that difficult line of needing money for their own survival but not wanting to be obsessed about it.

In the reading earlier, the author Sallie McFague states that in the 21st Century “the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism” and asks the question of what it would mean to get outside of capitalism in today’s world? We are all so submerged in the world of commerce both as workers and consumers that it is difficult to remember that there are some institutions that do not operate on the typical model of market capitalism. Our non-profit philanthropic institutions are an example which collect donations then distribute goods and services to those in need. There is no attempt to make a profit therefore they can provide goods and services to everyone free or reduced cost.

Another institution that operates on the edge of the market capitalism system is this church. Some might say that our church operates in the hardest aspects of both the non-profit and for-profit world. Our income to support this church is through the donations of members like you – sounds like a National Public radio pledge drive – while much of our spending is in the world of market capitalism. We cannot turn around to the electrical utility company and say donations are down this month so we can’t pay you but we will as soon as donations pick up. I would love to see their faces at the suggestion.

The existence of all elements of this religious community is dependent on the donations of money and time from you the members of the congregation. You are asked to donate what you can financially to sustain and grow our community. There is no market mechanism that determines the price in competition with other churches. Could you imagine charging for people to come for our worship services – $20 to hear the senior minister, $5 for the intern minister and a refund if you don’t like the message?

Perhaps I’ll talk to stewardship about this idea. Not only is the idea crass it misses an important point about why we are here. We have our message, our culture, and our values which we wish to promote to all who are interested. We believe our religious vision has value but we also believe that it is too important, too valuable for people to be prevented hearing our vision due to lack of money. Most religious groups want to transcend the artificial limits placed on access to places and experiences based on limited money.

Those limits are placed by our economic system in an attempt to handle the scarcity of a resource and in a desire to make a profit. Religion is attempting to remove these limits by seeing our message and values as a source of abundance not a cause for scarcity. Most of us are attracted to our religious community because our lives are improved in some way by being here.

Many of us feel affirmed by being part of this community, some of us have had life changing experiences here, and I know people who feel our Liberal religious message has been life-saving to them. How do you put a dollar price on such a place? You can’t. The work is too important but such activities have a cost. Therefore as a religious community we let each of us decide for ourselves about the value of the community we have here and the contribution we wish to make to ease that cost. We are outside much of the market system since we give our service away without charge and those of us who choose, contribute our money and time as we determine is appropriate.

Our economic system is very efficient at delivering a variety of products and services to people for a low price. That is its purpose and we all live with the benefits of that. Our economics system was never developed to be the promoter of values for our society that was what religion is for. Values such as ecological sustainability and greater justice for more people are not promoted in our current economic system unless the consumers force it to. Our consuming habits are perhaps the clearest way that we express our moral choices on a daily basis yet there seems to be a strong separation between our economics and our religion.

The famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie said that Christianity should not interfere with how money is made and only get involved in how its surplus should be dispersed in the form of charity. It seems that many religious organizations have not moved beyond such thinking therefore often fail to critique our economics system where it may be exploitive of people or abusive to our environment. If injustice in our society is caused by unethical production of goods, unsustainable consumption of resources, or deceitful advertising it not only appropriate to address the issues but I would say our religion calls us to do so.

In the reading we heard earlier, the author Sallie McFague discusses the use of the Christian doctrines of sin and evil in addressing the harm excessive and unregulated greed is harmful to our world. Her critique of market capitalism is that sustainability and justice for all inhabitants are not its central goals of the system. Now we do not talk about sin or evil much in the pulpits of our Unitarian Universalist churches perhaps that is why many of you are here and not at other churches – but I think the ideas behind the doctrines if not the terms themselves can be useful in addressing the excesses and exploitative elements of our economic system.

Now, the Liberal Religious tradition has moved away a long time ago from the doctrine of Original Sin where humanity is inherently depraved but the concept of sin itself is more ambiguous for us. I feel comfortable with McFague’s idea of sin being an excessive concern for ourselves at the expense of the needs of others or sustainability of the planet. Sin is something we are responsible for and can control through the choices we make.

McFague defines evil as the institutions, practices, and attitudes resulting from an exploitive economic system based on excessive individual self-interest, which creates suffering and deprivation in our world. For example, it may seem in my self-interest to buy a product at a low price but if the product was made by forced child labor then I think it is appropriate to call this a sinful act supporting an evil system. Strong but I feel appropriate words. We can replace sin with wrong and evil with bad, it is the meaning not the words that are important.

With these concepts of sin and evil then this sets up a great tension between our economic system and religion. Market capitalism believes that the good life is built by each of us pursuing our own enlightened self-interest. Religion cautions against excessive self-interest and reminds us that through our interdependence we are called to care for one another and our planet.

I think this is a question we deal with daily during satisfying our own needs is when does our enlightened self-interest become excessive self-interest? How do we, as religious people and consumers who desire to lead a good life, deal with this tension in our self-interest as we go about our busy lives and with the child who has just made yet another request for a Christmas present? You really want an easy answer for this one aren’t you – alas there isn’t one. We have to accept that tension between enlightened and excessive self-interest as real and difficult. Our choices as consumers can have a negative impact therefore we should be intentional and thoughtful about our purchasing choices.

The stewardship of our planet and welfare of all people is particularly important in the age of the Global Economy since the environmental impact and exploitation of people may occur far from our purchasing of a product therefore could remain invisible to us unless we are vigilant. The notion of interdependence between ourselves as consumers and the workers who produce the goods, wherever in the world they are, leads us to take responsibility for buying products that were produced without exploitation. Examples of exploitation would be child labor, coerced labor, or paying non-livable wages.

If our individual consumer decisions create an economic system that prevents those in need receiving basic necessities and those producing the goods a reasonable quality of life, then our individual decisions should be able to change this system. I, like many of you, have tried with my consumption habits to move beyond the obvious criteria of price, function, and style to consider the following factors:

Try to distinguish between my true long-term needs and my short-term often misplaced desires.

Can I borrow, barter or get used whatever I am wanting?

Consider factors other than price such as how goods were produced including working conditions, reputation of company involved, and environmental impact.

These criteria do not make shopping easier since they take effort and any desire for perfection will be very frustrating. The goal for me is greater intention and awareness in my consumer habits, which allows me to bring my religious values into my everyday life in a meaningful way. We are both beneficiaries of our market capitalism system and often sufferers in the hardships created by it.
Our economic system is good at delivering products for a low price and handling scarcity. It was not designed to and therefore does not do a good job of determining values or what is valuable.

In our consumer culture today it is too easy to confuse price and value – they are not the same thing. Just consider what is most valuable in your own life – I suspect it has nothing to do with the price you paid for them assuming they even had a price. The love of friends and family, the old photographs we have, a book of special importance to us, that great piece of music that brings us to tears, or that life-changing experience that might even have happened in this church. Those items are dealing in a currency that is far more important than money. They are dealing in the eternal values of finding what makes our life worth living and meaningful. Let the economic system determine price, we are the only ones that define for ourselves what has value and worth in our lives.

——————

Jones, Serene and Lakeland, Paul. Editors. Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) p.141, 148

Crary, David. Meltdown fallout: some parents rethink toy-buying http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081129/ap-on-bi-ge/toy-worries (accessed 29th November, 2008)

Oelschlaeger, Max Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental crisis. (New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press, 1994) p.96

Parke, David The Epic of Unitarianism (Skinner House, Boston, 1985) p.149

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.148

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.141

Meeks, M. Douglas God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1989) p.20

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) p.148

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Harvesting Thanksgiving 2008

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

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© Davidson Loehr
Brian Ferguson
23 November 2008
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Thanksgiving is part of a harvest cycle, where we plant and then hope we can be thankful for what we reap. In that spirit, I want to share a short and thankful focus from the Buddhist tradition showing us what we hope for every time we plant seeds – whether in the ground, in our lives or in our worship services:

Now we have finished. Everyone stand and we will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because even if we did not have a great enlightenment, we had a small enlightenment. If we did not have a small enlightenment, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So let’s thank the Buddha. (Hsuan Hua)

Amen.

HOMILY: Harvesting Thanksgiving
Davidson Loehr

Since I needed my Thanksgiving reflections today to be focused on something significant but fairly distant, I want to use a metaphor to transpose some deeper dimensions of Thanksgiving into history, politics and life. This may sound like the opening to the sermon of a few weeks ago, when I said I wanted to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. But it’s a homily, not a full-length sermon, so it won’t be that ambitious.

Thanksgiving, as we know, is a harvest festival, in the tradition of harvest festivals going back to ancient times. They planted, then they harvested what they had planted. What did they plant?

On the literal level, they planted the usual stuff – beans, squash, other vegetables, they cultivated orchards and the rest. But deeper, it’s different. So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving in this country, which happened in 1621.

You all know much of this story. In December of 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts.

Mother Nature wasn’t on their side, though Father Time was. They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. One hundred and two of them arrived here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.

Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead. This was the preparation for the first Thanksgiving, and there was not a yellow Happy Face in the bunch.

The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. According to one source, the menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.

But now let’s explore the metaphor. What did the Pilgrims really plant, that let them reap this feast? They certainly didn’t plant venison, wild turkey or oyster seeds.

What the Pilgrims really planted were two crops: hope, and empowerment. They planted hope rather than fear or despair, and empowerment rather than just rolling over and dying.

That’s an easy segue from history to politics because, to put it in a contemporary sound bite, what those Pilgrims were saying to life was “Yes, we can!”

We are just near the beginning of a new planting season in American history. And those seeds of hope and empowerment have been planted on lawns, bumper stickers and windows everywhere.

That’s a huge part of the reason this amazingly unlikely man Barack Obama will be our 44th president: because after the last round of political seeds planted and the harvest we have reaped from that, people were simply starving for hope, the power to make a difference, and the chance to make a difference. We don’t yet know how this new planting will work out, or what kind of harvest we will have.

But we should look over the last crops we’ve planted, because the harvest is damned near killing us.

Think of some of the seeds we have planted during the past three decades or so:

– We planted the seeds of what the French have called “savage capitalism”: an endorsement of high-level greed with only the barest of government restraint. We planted ideas and behaviors intentionally exalting profits over people, stock prices over the livelihoods and lives of human beings. And in the harvest was a crop of American workers forced to compete with the cheapest labor in the world, and unable to do so.

– We sowed the idea that healthcare was a market product deserved only by those who could afford it, rather than a necessary protection of all our citizens, as every other industrialized country in the world does. And we have reaped a harvest of perhaps fifty million citizens who cannot afford to be protected from accidents, disease, or astronomic medical bills that have plunged millions into bankruptcy and desperation. Also in the harvest are an estimated 18,000 deaths a year credited to their lack of adequate health care protection.

– We planted the idea that we could use our armies to invade any country with something we wanted. On one level, we’ve done this for a very long time, as have other strong countries. But in the last seventy years, the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq was the first invasion of a sovereign nation on that scale since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. And from this planting of violent militarism, we have harvested the deaths of over 4,200 American soldiers, and many times that number torn apart physically, mentally or both, as well as the deaths of nearly 1.3 million Iraqis, guilty of trying to defend their country from a foreign invasion, or of just being unfortunate enough to live in a country whose oil we lust after.

I could go on down the list of bad seeds we have planted and the bitter harvests we have reaped, but you all know those seeds, those crops, and those harvests of shame.

Choosing the seeds we will plant is not an isolated act. It is interconnected with everything that follows.

The wonderfully wise ancient Greeks coined a famous, short formula for how this kind of sowing and reaping works. Here’s how they put it:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

Plant an action, reap a habit;

Plant a habit, reap a character;

Plant a character, reap a destiny.

We rob ourselves if we treat Thanksgiving like a superficial happy-face festival. The harvest metaphor is too rich for that, and offers too much insight and power to ignore.

We plant, we reap, then we hope we can be thankful for the crop. But whether we can be thankful or not depends on what we planted, and our diligence in nourishing and attending to it.

No planting or crops are ever perfect. History doesn’t show us anybody who was ever that good. Even the wonderfully wise ancient Greeks had slavery, limited rights for women, allowed only about ten percent of the adult population to vote, and seemed to care about only those who excelled above the rest. The United States of America has, at its best, grown up around a very different dream, from very different kinds of seeds.

I wonder if you’ve ever read the full poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which our Statue of Liberty stands. She intentionally contrasts our dream with that of the Greeks, because she says we want a different kind of harvest. Her poem is titled “The New Colossus,” named in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Listen to the poem in terms of the harvest metaphor we’ve been using, and see if you don’t hear the American Dream in a new way:

The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Those are some of the most fertile seeds of hope and empowerment ever planted. That message, “Yes, we can!” is the most fundamental expression of the American Dream. Let us plant, in our nation and in our hearts, seeds of hope and empowerment. Let us tend to them, nurture them so they might flourish. Let us hope Mother Nature and Father Time will be on our side. And then let us pray that when the harvest comes, we can give thanks.

HOMILY: Brian Ferguson

Confession is not part of our Liberal religious tradition but I do have a confession to make. The Thanksgiving holiday remains a bit foreign to me. Now being Scottish I didn’t grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday but I don’t think we Scots are an ungrateful bunch. Yet again Scottish weather with its continuous rain and howling wind does not encourage a great sense of gratitude in anyone – except perhaps umbrella makers. The North American Thanksgiving holiday does not conjure family memories or traditions for me as it may for many of you. It also feels for me too close in time to Christmas – a holiday which has always been important to my family. Thanksgiving gets in the way of Christmas for me. Perhaps I’m missing the point but Thanksgiving seems to be predominantly about stressing oneself in preparation for the upcoming Christmas season. We attempt to fly or drive somewhere along with everyone else then express gratitude by eating too much. I’ve been your intern minister for three months now so I thought it was time you saw my curmudgeon side. That was it. The grinch that stole Thanksgiving.

More seriously, while not having a personal tradition of Thanksgiving I feel taking time to give thanks for our spiritual and material possessions to be a healthy practice. Meister Eckhart, the wise 13th century mystic, once said that if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. The idea of “thank you” as a prayer, as an earnest appreciation of something beyond our selves, resonates with me. Giving thanks when we are healthy, content, and life is going well seems easy and appropriate to do. We are probably too busy having a good time to do it but expressing gratitude would be the right thing to do when life is good. Giving thanks after we have come through hard times and recovering might even give us a heightened appreciation for the simple gifts in our life. What about giving thanks during tough times such as many of us are experiencing now? How do we adopt an attitude of gratitude when many of us are struggling with the various hardships we are experiencing as a nation, as a religious community, and as individuals? I struggle with expressing gratitude at this time. Avoidance or complaining would be so much easier.

There have been many studies conducted saying that during times of economic hardship two things increase – going to movies and alcohol consumption. Such times of uncertainty can lead us to want to escape from our present circumstance. Temporary escapes from a difficult situation can allow us some relief from stress and gain some distance from the issue at hand. Taken to excess such escapism can also lead to an avoidance of reality and an abdication of responsibility. At the other extreme of escapism is the tendency to look to blame someone or something for the difficult circumstances. Blaming others for our own misfortune can really feel good in the short term. We hear of plenty of blame for the global economic conditions – Wall Street, predatory mortgage lenders, greedy Chief Executive Officers, our President, the Republicans, Chinese imports, immigrants to this country – of which I am one. Voting for the Democrats four and eight years ago is not an immunization to our own responsibility or complicity for the current turmoil. Similarly voting for John McCain a few weeks ago is not an abdication of responsibility for what happens in the next four years.

If escapism and blame are unhelpful in tough times then how can expressing gratitude be useful? We usually express gratitude in return for something we receive such as the help of another, a gift received, or simple appreciation of our good fortune. The gifts that life presents us are not always apparent in times of hardship. We are more sensitive, perhaps overly so, to what we have lost or have fear of losing than what we have. We may have less than we had a year ago, financially many of us have a lot less than just two months ago. Do we give thanks for the contents of the half full glass or dwell on the losses of the half empty glass? In hard times the half empty glass seems the much easier option.

Another wise person, who also happened to be my manager in my first job said to me that “it doesn’t have to be a good experience to be an experience.” I have found this observation to be very useful at various times during my life. Life provides learning opportunities whether we want them or not. Perhaps in times of hardship rather than times of plenty we can find what really is most important to us as we are faced with limits, loss, and scarcity. Times of hardship force us to make difficult decisions that we would rather avoid. External events force us to give up things that seem important to us and sometimes we find those things to have been more of a burden than a treasure.

Many of us turn to religion to make sense of the hardships and losses we experience. Sometimes it can feel that religion is just a spoil sport in our life. When things are going well for us religion can be the nagging reminder that tends to dampen our happiness by making us feel guilty for our good fortune and reminding us of the suffering of others. Some religious leaders call this encouraging humility but really we just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time. Alternatively, when things are going badly for us, then religion becomes the voice of hope or explainer of our fate – have faith then things will turn out alright or there is a reason for our hardship. The famous American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed the function of the preacher was “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” In my less gracious moods this actually sounds like it could be fun. I think that is my curmudgeon side again.
While this view of religion as a counter-balance in people’s lives between comfort and affliction is popular amongst many I find it too simplistic and unhelpful. How can we in good faith separate people into the comfortable and the afflicted? Life is just not that simple. In our own lives most of us have that intertwining of good fortune and suffering simultaneously. Our jobs provide us both a livelihood and high level of stress. Our families can be both a source of support and a burden. Retirement is an opportunity for freedom and a source of insecurity. Even our religious community can provide us with both heartwarmth and heartache as we deal with the uncertainties of life. I think many of us have both doubt and suffering in our lives simultaneously with hope and strength. Religion at its best helps us to be grateful for the good in our life while providing comfort to the distresses of life. Good religion reminds us that we can be both the givers and the recipients of the great eternal values of gratitude, compassion and loving-kindness.

We are not individuals isolated from our surrounding community and our actions matter. Ultimately, this is what I am most thankful for since I do believe what we do and how we do it matters. While not everything we do may seem to be religious, I believe that how we do things can and should be religious. When we treat others with honesty, compassion and respect it is religious. While it can seem our small actions make little difference to the greater events around us, our actions matter greatly to those around us and most directly affected by them. I actually think our actions especially actions of gratitude, kindness and compassion are more significant in times of hardship and uncertainty. At such times people are in more need of help and support while there is less in terms of money and goodwill.

For me, the greatest gift expressing gratitude we have to give, is the gift of service to others and in troubled times it is often harder for us to give. In tough times then this gift is more needed and more appreciated, therefore our gift of service to others returns to us by making us feel more valued. The gift of service to others allows the giver to feel useful and the recipient to feel cared for. A gift that addresses the most basic human needs of being valued and being useful perhaps reflects a variation on our traditional view of Thanksgiving. Or perhaps our gift of service to others is a prayer that says thank you to the miracle that is each of our lives and maybe that is the very essence of Thanksgiving.

Or perhaps my view of Thanksgiving is too foreign for you in which case I’ll remind you of the Buddhist prayer Davidson read earlier: Now we have finished. Everyone stand and will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because if Brian’s message of giving thanks through service to others was not enlightening, then we had Davidson’s message. If Davidson’s message of a harvest of hope and empowerment was not enlightening, then we had the music. And if the music was not comforting, at least we had comfortable seats. So let’s thank the Buddha.

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The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us find a spiritual North Star to steer by when we are torn between life’s over-rated pleasures and its under-rated treasures.

We want to feel the difference between being opportunistic and being authentic, and learn how we can better choose the one that gives us more and better life.

Let us find the determination not to do what we should not do, the courage to do what we should do, and that elusive wisdom that lets us tell the difference.

How often we chase after things we don’t need, like dogs chase cars, not knowing what good they’d do us if we caught them. Can we learn to yearn for what we need rather than what we merely want?

And as for our lives – if they can’t be as long as we would like, can they be as rich and rewarding as we wish?

These are just some of the questions we feel along life’s path on this day as on many days. We offer them up, to speak them out loud in the hope that the person who hears them will be us.

Amen

SERMON: The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

There’s something exhilarating about being present when high ideals and aspirations are discussed, even if all we do is listen. We consult experts in diet, exercise, ecology, finances and a few dozen other areas, all important, all with a few really gifted and motivated people available to pass on their inspiring visions to us, and it feels well worth the money we’ve spent. In the meantime, we stay overweight, out of shape, eating poorly, handling our finances poorly, and the rest of it. Still, it’s inspiring.

Hearing about gifted religious visionaries and prophets is like this, too. This is the third in the series of three sermons on the early 19th century thinkers who helped define Unitarianism as a separate religion in America, a religion that was derived from, but distinct from, liberal Christianity. All three men were in their 30s when they delivered the sermons that Unitarian students are still required to read. William Ellery Channing was 38 when he delivered the sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819. Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35 when he gave his address at the Harvard Divinity School – the last time he was invited to speak there for 30 years. The minister I want to talk about today was Theodore Parker, who was just 31 when he delivered a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” in 1841. I have to say that Parker is my favorite of the three, and was from the first time I read their sermons nearly thirty years ago.

Parker was an almost mythic person. Born the eleventh child of a farmer, he grew up very poor. He was mostly self-educated, then wound up graduating from Harvard Divinity School. By the time he entered the ministry, he could read twenty languages. After he died, at the age of 49, it was discovered that his library was the largest personal library in America, with about 50,000 volumes. His biographer (Henry Steele Commager) said that Parker wrote notes in the margins of almost all of them. If he actually read them all, that would be almost three books a day from the day he was born.
At his peak, he preached to around 3,000 people, the largest audience in America – without a microphone. His sermons routinely lasted over an hour, were thoroughly researched and brilliantly written. Besides being the most powerful and combative voice of liberal religion in America – he was far more combative than either William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson – he was ferociously active on behalf of women’s rights, prison reform and especially anti-slavery causes in the 1840s and 1850s, well before that was a cause most Unitarians would touch. That was partly because many wealthy Unitarians made a lot of money from the business of slavery, and partly because it was a rude subject, not suited to high-class cocktail hours. They looked to their ministers for comfort, not challenge.

He was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South. One story about him that shows both his courage and his ferocity is about the time that he performed a wedding ceremony for two escaped slaves, holding a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other, to shoot anyone who tried to stop him.

Martin Luther King once said, “We begin to die the day we become silent about the things that matter.” As far as I can tell, Parker never had one of those days in his life. He was uninhibited in his writings against dishonest religion. The things he said in just this one sermon defined the theological debates in America for the next generation, and are still relevant and powerful.

But I want you to hear his words, because he was very good with words. So imagine, if you can, sitting in a Unitarian church on May 19, 1841, when American Christianity – including Unitarianism – was still quite supernatural and often so conservative that it would feel a bit like today’s right-wing Christianity. Imagine hearing some of these words spoken by a brilliant and fiery 31-year-old preacher. (I’ve paraphrased some of these excerpts, to transport them from early 19th to early 21st century ways of speaking.) -

While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands.

Anyone, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one area passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next. The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted with [a lot of] dirt.

Since our various theologies are so transient, why do we need to accept the teachings of men, as though they were the word of God?

Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, rather than the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, any more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his words.

Wasn’t Jesus our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God. Viewed in this way, how beautiful the life of Jesus is.

God’s word will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing.

Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God.

Real religion gives men new life.

One hundred sixty-seven years later, many of these words would still send most believers into fits of apoplexy.

For Parker, the only sanction that religion requires “is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us – Christ and the Father abiding within us.” This is the permanent religious core of genuine Christianity, for Parker; the rest is transient and dispensable – including the creeds, orthodoxies, rituals, costumes, and if yo think about it, even the churches and ministers. (Gary Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 1805-1900, p. p. 86).

As you can hear – though Parker seemed not to hear it – the logical implications of his insights pulverized the intellectual foundations of Christianity, theism, and all religions, reducing them to little more than ways of talking about high morals and ideals – which of course can be done without using any religious language at all.

Even if his ministerial colleagues couldn’t articulate it, they must have felt the force of this earthquake in the foundations of their comfortable faith, because they reacted by cutting him off from the privileges of ministerial fellowship. Nearly all of the Boston area ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him, and some refused to speak to him (Dorrien, p. 88).

The Unitarian ministers told Parker it was his moral duty to resign from the Unitarian Association, but he was both too bright and too shrewd to make it that easy for them. He said they would have to expel him, thereby showing they do have a creed. They backed down – my image is that they had their tails between their legs. And so, as one historian puts it, “The first Unitarian heresy trial was over (Dorrien, p. 90).”

Parker believed the time had come to sweep away all religious authorities except the authority of reason and spiritual intuition (Dorrien, p. 99).

True Christianity, he said, is not about the death or divinity of Christ, but about the death of sin and the life of holy goodness in our heart: “Each man must be his own Christ, or he is no Christian (Dorrien, p. 99).” He defined real Christianity simply as “Being Good and Doing Good” – not needing any miracles or supernaturalism or creeds – or churches or ministers. This drew complete outrage from nearly all clergy, including the Unitarians.

At first, Parker naively hoped that American Unitarianism could become America’s best religious hope, but within a few years, decided that it was so unwilling to see or to think that there was no hope for it.

It’s a little confusing that he continued to insist on calling himself a Unitarian – especially since the leading Unitarian ministers wouldn’t claim him, swap pulpits with him or speak to him, and wanted him to resign.

But Unitarianism was a complex thing in the Boston of his day. It was a religion of the upper class, associated with intelligent, educated and sophisticated people, and Parker wasn’t willing to let go of that identity, which he had worked so hard to earn. He had grown up as a very poor boy, worked hard, married a very wealthy woman. They moved in those social circles – though Parker’s anti-slavery work really ended their welcome there, too. I think that giving up the “Unitarian” label would have felt to him like losing that social and personal identity.

He wanted the rest of the Unitarians to grow into the larger and more honest understanding of religion that he had found. He said the Unitarians were “standing still, and becoming more and more narrow and bigoted from year to year-. There is little scholarship and less philosophical thinking among the Unitarians,” he wrote. “Some of them engage in the great moral movements of the day, such as the anti-slavery movement. But the sect as such is opposed to all [intellectual] reforms (Dorrien, p. 101).”

His opponents used his notorious radical social activities to label and smear him, partly so they wouldn’t have to answer his powerful critiques of their unexamined but comfortable religion.

So Theodore Parker lived the powerful contradiction of preaching to the largest crowd in America while being deeply alienated from the Unitarians, and spurned as unbearable by most respectable high-class socialites (Dorrien, p. 103). No matter how fierce he was in public, he grieved his whole adult life in private over the continual attacks and rejection from the people and the denomination to whom he believed he offered valuable but unwanted help.

In January of 1859, he was told that he was dying of tuberculosis. It did not diminish his spirit, and one of the most inspiring things he ever wrote, he wrote in his Journal after receiving this death sentence: “I am ready to die… nothing to fear. When I see the Inevitable I fall in love with her (John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900, p. 352).”

Since his wife had money, they could travel. He left Massachusetts to spend his last year traveling Europe, and settled in Rome. He would die in Italy in 1860. A few months before he died, he wrote another memorable line to a friend: “I have had great powers” he said, “and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

All three of the great Unitarian preachers of the early 19th century were absolutely brilliant men who stood head-and-shoulders above almost everyone around them – though whether any of them can really be called Unitarian is a different matter.

William Ellery Channing, who named “Unitarian Christianity,” refused to join the Unitarian Association when it first began in 1825, fearing it would just dumb down religion and lure people to the lowest common denominator where they wouldn’t think for themselves, but would look for some sort of creeds (or principles) to recite. To put it in modern terms, Channing feared that the Unitarian Association would grow into a narcissistic cult, where people were taught to worship the kinds of things that their kind of people believed – that’s a working definition of narcissism. And their churches would tell them when they entered just what those things were that their kind of people needed to believe, and maybe even print them on wallet-sized cards. And that’s one element of a cult.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the three, called Unitarianism “corpse-cold,” and was not considered a Unitarian by any of the leading ministers of his day. He thought Unitarianism had become smug, shallow and irrelevant.

And Theodore Parker, the most brilliant of them all, was blacklisted from all the Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his liberal thinking, was told he should resign from the Unitarian Association, and told that he wasn’t a real Unitarian. One member of the church where he delivered his most famous sermon even said that he’d rather see every Unitarian church burned to the ground than to see Parker’s beliefs preached from a single pulpit.

The important truth is that these three men stood out against the background of Unitarians of their day because the overwhelming majority of Unitarian ministers of their day were not memorable, and their beliefs and actions are hard to look back on with much admiration when we hear these stories. This is true, of course, of all the great visionaries of history: they only stand out because the vast majority of people around them couldn’t see or wouldn’t pursue the vision they saw so clearly.

So these three men were prophets of a higher truth than almost any Unitarians would or could see, though they continue to inspire new Unitarian ministers who are still required to read them. The righteous words of those who opposed them are long, and deservedly, forgotten.

These three weren’t serving Unitarianism, and they were all pretty clear about it. They were serving what Parker finally labeled as the Permanent in religion: True Religion, Absolute Religion, Honest Religion. And throughout history, those voices have always been a tiny minority in all religions – Unitarians are no better or worse than the rest.

We like to think that we listen to serious religious thinkers the way orchestras listen to the concert “A” that is played before all rehearsals and concerts, for them to tune to, though that’s not really true, because we so seldom do tune to their visions in any life-changing way. We really listen to them the same way we listen to all the other experts and motivational speakers in so many other areas: diet, exercise, ecology, finance and the rest of them. We may not be motivated enough or courageous enough to follow them down the demanding path of getting into our best spiritual shape, but we’re at least serious enough to listen, and to carry home some fertile seeds in the form of ideas.

There haven’t been many thinkers in any religion who wanted to move beyond the easy comfort of fitting in with like-minded people. That’s still why we come to church, isn’t it – to enjoy the company of like-minded people? Just think of how strong that gravitational attraction is for you, and how much effort it would take to break free of that gravitational pull. That’s a measure of how unlikely it is that great prophets will ever really effect the changes they see. I think that’s why we’re actually happier with these outspoken types after they’ve died, when we can treat them reverently rather than seriously.

But if these prophets, including Theodore Parker, are right, then getting in spiritual shape is as easy and as hard as actually thinking about who we are and why we are here, about what is most worth believing and doing.

This seems to be what all the prophets have said in their many different ways: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the biblical prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, all the way up to relatively minor – but still stirring – people like Channing, Emerson and Parker.

These were people at the Olympic level of spiritual development, no matter how out of shape they may have been in other ways – none of them was in very good financial shape, for instance, and I don’t think any of them lifted weights. They were both empowering and troubling people. They didn’t exist just to tell us that we’re really special just as we are, or that this business of authenticity is easy. They said, as Jesus put it, that the road was narrow and very few ever wanted to take it, even though it was open to all. They said salvation was free, but it wasn’t cheap. It’s about transformation, not blithely following along with a group of like-minded people.

Yet they are mesmerizing, aren’t they? They’re like charismatic self-help gurus, only moreso. I keep thinking of some of the words Theodore Parker wrote near the end of his life: “I have had great powers – and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

There, at least, is where Parker was so much like the rest of us: we all have great powers that we have only half used. Isn’t that one reason we come here – to keep being exhorted to develop the other half of our great powers, and to use them to help ourselves and our world come alive? We come seeking wholeness, and so often we don’t want to admit that, if only we will, we can have it.

Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr | Comments Off

The Audacity of Hope

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

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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!

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The Audacity of Hope

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First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin - 4700 Grover Avenue Austin, TX 78756 - (512) 452-6168

Archive for the ‘Former Ministers’ Category

Pages

UU Links

Recent Posts

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Meta

Sunday Service Times: 9:45 and 11:30 First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin - 4700 Grover Avenue Austin, TX 78756 - (512) 452-6168

Sunday Service Times: 9:45 and 11:30
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin - 4700 Grover Avenue Austin, TX 78756 - (512) 452-6168