First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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© Davidson Loehr
 7 September 2008
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

We give thanks for life and truth, and are grateful when they find us. The kind of light that can heal comes in so many forms, from so many directions. It may be that the best way to live is with the kind of openness and trust that seems so much easier for children than for adults.

When the man Jesus pointed to small children and said we must be like them if we are to enter the kingdom of God, it was a deep truth that transcended even him, and was rooted in the deepest nature of life itself.

Let us not think that religion is about swooning to the sound of heavenly words or music. It’s about coming alive in a deep and fulfilling way. Living well is more than “the best revenge” – it’s also the best religion. And it’s what generates the heavenly music, not the other way around.

Let us give thanks when we are found by the kind of truth that can set us free and make us feel more whole.

And let us try to be vehicles of that kind of truth and healing for the parts of our world that touch our heads and hearts. Those in our larger world need us, just as we need them, for we really are all in this together. And for that too we give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Covenants

“Covenant” is a weird word. In 22 years, I’ve never preached on it, seldom used it, and get suspicious of people who throw it around like it’s something of which all really cool people should have one.

So after deciding to bring it to you as a Sunday theme, I had to try and understand it well enough to know why I think it’s worth your time to hear about it in a sermon. For me, that meant trying to learn a wide variety of covenants, both from religion and from real life, because I think the more ways we can say something, the better the chances are that we actually know what we’re talking about.

So let me start with you the way I started with myself – by talking about a lot of different kinds of covenants, so the pattern and feel of what this weird word means might come alive from several different directions. It’s actually about something pretty important, and not at all confined to religion.

One of the classic statements is from the Bible, from the book of Joshua, where the writer says that you can serve any god you choose, then ends with the famous line, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)

Another is the famous statement of Martin Luther’s, when he decided he had to serve a different definition and style of God than the Roman Catholic Church had served for almost 1500 years, when he said, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” As I said last week, this wasn’t long before he had to hide out for a year and a half because the Church wanted to kill him. But he was sustained in his hiding out by the new faith to which he had given himself heart, mind and soul.

Probably the most detailed and demanding example is in the religion of Islam. We are in their most sacred month, the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are expected to fast during the day for a whole month, as an exercise in spiritual purification. But in addition, there are four other Pillars of Islam, expected of all. They are required to profess their faith, do the ritual prayers that occur five times a day, pay a percentage of their income each year to benefit the poor – the poor can demand this! – and at some time in their life, make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Those are all pretty dramatic. But the idea of being possessed by an idea or a cause that gives you life is not just something that happens in organized religions.

I’m a member of a local group of former military officers. It was started by a retired Air Force general I know, and most of the officers were Colonels or generals. I’m the token former Lieutenant, and the token minister. What I like most about it is the deep and powerful covenant these men made with the oath they took as officers, and how much that oath still empowers them. For the past few years, they have been mailing letters to the very highest level military commanders, some of whom they know personally, reminding them that this oath was to uphold the Constitution, not support a President who has violated his office by launching an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and systematically destroying the freedoms and civil liberties at home that these soldiers had once believed they were fighting to protect. “We have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution,” they will say, “and we have all devoted our lives to that duty.” That’s a covenant, a very powerful one. At one time or other, most of these men have risked their lives on behalf of that covenant.

It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. The three banners we have hanging up on the front wall are inviting a kind of covenant (TO COME ALIVE, TO SEEK TRUTH, TO HEAL OUR WORLD). It is the covenant of people in almost every religion I know of, anywhere on earth. Is there a religion anywhere whose people don’t believe they are there to seek the kind of truth that can set them free, help them come move alive, and help heal themselves, their relationships with others, and whatever parts of their world they can touch? It’s very close to the definition of what it means to be religious, or just to be serious about life. And taking it seriously, giving ourselves to it, is a covenant that can be as binding as a General’s oath to uphold the Constitution, or Martin Luther’s saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

The banners and liturgical candles beneath them are reminders. Banners point to the lights because those ideals can each open us to kinds of light we need. The lights point to the banners, because we need to be lit up by plugging into only the highest ideals, and letting them take possession of us like the angels of our better nature.

The story of Androcles and the Lion also shows a kind of covenant. (I told this as the children’s Storytime at the beginning of this service.) It’s a very old story. Ancient sources insist that it is a true story, told by someone who witnessed the scene in the arena. It comes from Aesop’s Fables, and Aesop lived 2500 years ago, about the same time the Buddha lived. Androcles’ covenant was with Life. The lion was just the form of life that needed his help. It could have been a dog, a cat or a child, it happened to be a lion. The lion’s covenant was simpler. It was just with Androcles, who had probably saved his life.

And that wonderful ten-word statement of the spirit of liberal religion in the Bible that I read you last week is also inviting you into a covenant: “Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to what is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21).

I don’t want to push the examples and metaphors for this too far, but I’ll try another. If life were an automobile, the covenant would be the transmission. It is how we get the power transferred to us, how we assimilate, incarnate, the promised power of religion. Every commitment with consequences comes from a covenant.

Now not all covenants are good. Not all gods are good, and not all gods give life to us. Some drain it from us in the name of lower and more selfish aims. After all, Mafia members also have a covenant. So do those conspiring to commit a crime. Corporations that punish whistle-blowers are saying that the whistle-blowers violated an implied covenant to put the corporation above all other considerations, including truth, justice and safety. But one of the most hopeful facts of life is that most of us can tell the difference between coming alive and selling out, and we know it very early in life.

I’ve been reading some fantasy series written for young people this summer, and It’s interesting how often this idea of serving high ideals with your life comes up, and kids understand it almost intuitively, I think. One series of books was by Rick Riordan (Ryer-den, rhymes with “fire”), four volumes on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, all based in the ancient Greek myths, and a wonderful retelling of them. The children are called half-bloods, meaning half human, but also the sons and daughters of the Greek gods, and so they have the nature of their divine parents, and you can predict how they’ll act and what they’ll be passionate about.

I know you’re getting what this is about. It is really about a fundamental concept in religion and life: the question of what are we serving, and whether it gives us life, whether it and we are a blessing to ourselves and others.

Here’s another example that may not sound at all like a covenant. My undergraduate degree was in music theory from the University of Michigan, and I still remember a remark from a lecture in composition, about the French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote “Bolero” but also a lot of more complex stuff, and was regarded as perhaps the greatest orchestrator of the 20th Century. The line that stayed with me came when the professor said the most remarkable thing about Ravel was that he never published a bad piece of music. He wrote some, of course – even the best composers write some bad music. But he destroyed it before he died. He never published a bad piece of music because the idea of it violated something that seemed sacred to Ravel: only to serve the muses at the highest level possible to him, nothing less.

As I’ve reflected on it over the years, I’ve thought this really makes Ravel a lot like a saint, one of those people way more perfect than we’d ever aspire to be. We don’t hear stories of saints being really nasty, rude, cruel, or selling out to a lobbyist. I don’t know how they were in real life, but the image created of them by those who told and edited their stories was an image of someone living a nearly perfect life. That’s how Ravel was like a saint. Living the live of a perfect composer who never published a bad piece of music, no matter what the market demanded of him – and you know the market clamored for more pieces like “Bolero” (which Ravel once described as eight minutes of orchestration without music).

When you come here on Sunday, you know that I, Brian Ferguson our ministerial intern, all of our paid and unpaid musicians, our lay leaders, greeters and ushers will always be trying to serve the highest ideals we can. If you’ve been coming here for awhile, you know this, but It’s worth saying out loud from time to time. we’re serious about the time we all spend together here, because we have made a covenant with high religious ideals, high musical ideals, a covenant to serve the truths that can make us more whole, help us come more alive, help us heal ourselves and those others in our world whose lives we touch. That is as sacred as it gets, and that’s what we’re here to serve, every week.

Every week, you know this is a room where you can come to hear inspiring and challenging words. If theyre more challenging than inspiring, they may not always be comfortable. But if we’re doing our job, they will always be about coming alive, seeking truth and healing our world rather than hearing about outsourcing, downsizing, maximizing profit for stockholders, winning through intimidation or learning how to swim with the sharks, as though that wouldn’t just turn us into sharks, while outsourcing our souls.

This church, like all sanctuaries, is committed to being a nourishing place to dream of making better music with our lives, and protecting the dreamers. It is a place, and these worship services are homes, where we can dream in peace together – dreams of finding and being converted by the kinds of truths that can help us become more free and whole, filled to overflowing with life, so the world around us might be nourished by the overflow.

The goal of all this seems to be to live as Ravel did his music, only publishing the best. To the extent that we can pull it off, It’s pretty admirable.

What if the children’s author Rick Riordan and the composer Ravel are right? What if we are all half-divine, called to find that higher voice, those angels of our better nature, the healing kind of harmony, let it get inside our souls and shape us in its image? What if all the works we published in our lives had the mark of that kind of excellent spirit? We’d be eligible for sainthood, for one thing.

Here’s another way of putting this. you’re going through your life, wandering around a bit. You see this church, but you think, “Oh, that’s religion, and I don’t trust it. It isn’t honest. I know religion, and it isn’t honest.” Then you come in, hang around and listen for a bit, and you think, Oh well, I get this. It’s just ideas, abstract ideals and values, like reading philosophy books. I get it. Well, that was interesting. Ho hum.” Then one day – it can happen at any time – you become aware of a large sort of animal near you who is suffering. It’s a thorn of some kind stuck into it, a big painful thing. The animal needs your help. You’ve learned about suffering, and truth, and life, and know that even you can help alleviate suffering. It’s a little scary, but you find some courage – maybe it comes from realizing that after all you are half divine, and you call on the power and courage of that god or goddess who’s always been with you as part of your soul. So you do it. In spite of some fear, you pull out the thorn in this animal’s foot. You do it perhaps not because you cared so much for this one suffering animal, but you have learned to care for life, and this potentially powerful creature is very much alive. You heal it. It is only afterwards, when you begin to notice how much more easily and lightly you are walking, that you realize the animal, all along, was really you.

And this life-changing little drama has a sound track. It’s accompanied by a choir of the better angels of our nature, singing some of the most beautiful music ever published.

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Meg Barnhouse
May 4, 2008

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS – SWUU DISTRICT ANNUAL MEETING
AUSTIN, TEXAS

David Bumbaugh
APRIL 26, 2008

“What the world needs from Liberal Religion.” That is a sweeping topic and one that is daunting to say the least. Who among us is qualified to speak for the world? For that matter, who among us is qualified to speak for liberal religion? Unitarians and Universalists have long been part of what is generally known as liberal religion, but the scope of liberal religion is far larger than our movement. Liberal Religion is a context in which we exist, but it is neither defined by nor exhausted by our particular history, institutional structures and visions. Nonetheless, that is the topic we have been called to address, and a long career as a preacher has equipped me fully to speak with great authority on vast subjects about which I know precious little.

In May of 1961, I stood on the floor of the General Assembly, waiting for the Moderator to announce the result of the vote that would bring the Unitarian Universalist Association into formal existence, a vote that would end the separate histories of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. When the formal announcement came, it was a surprise to no one. The assembly had reaffirmed the will of the constituent congregations–an overwhelming vote for consolidation. The delegates responded with a standing ovation.

This was a moment I had worked for since I began my ministry to Universalist congregations in April of 1957. I had preached, written editorials, and debated about the promise inherent in the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. I had attended the meeting in Syracuse that had hammered out the details of the consolidation process.

The congregation I was serving had voted for consolidation, even though the members of that small rural church confessed to feeling profoundly outclassed by and inferior to every Unitarian they had ever met. I should have been among those applauding. Instead, I stood off to one side of the hall, weeping.

I was overwhelmed by the sense that something important had just died, that I had just voted away my religious home, that I had just witnessed the end of the Universalist movement, in the words of the historian, Whitney Cross, a church whose impact …on reform movements and upon the growth of modern religious attitudes might prove to be greater than that of either the Unitarians or the freethinkers. [A movement whose] warfare upon the forces fettering the American mind might be demonstrated to have equaled the influence of the transcendentalist philosophers.

Over the nearly half century that has passed, I have devoted my life to the movement we brought into being in Boston on that day in May of 1961. In parish ministry, and now, teaching in one of our two remaining seminaries, my life has been trammelled up in Unitarian Universalism. But, truth be told, I have never felt quite at home in this movement. I have felt like an orphan who has been taken in by a kindly family, but who never has mastered the skills necessary to be fully a part of that family. Somewhere, deep in my soul, there is a sense of loss that never quite goes away. In odd moments, I have tried to plumb that deep loss.

Over time, it has occurred to me that the loss, which often seemed so personal, is, in truth, much more corporate and institutional. Somewhere, over the years following consolidation, we have lost an important insight into the essential nature of religion, and the role it plays in the life of the human community. The process by which that loss occurred, is rooted deep in the history of the two movements that came together in May of 1961.

In the first third of the twentieth century, Unitarianism and Universalism both were confronting serious losses. The catastrophe of the Great War, that war to end all wars, had made a mockery of the easy optimism that had characterized much of liberal religion. The debacle of the Great Depression had only deepened the sense of pessimism and despair.

By the middle of the 1930′s the condition of the Unitarian movement was so desperate that the American Unitarian Association was forced to appoint a Commission of Appraisal. The central charge given that Commission consisted of a series of questions: Has Unitarianism any real function in the modern world?…How far does Unitarianism in America measure up to the requirements of the new age? What must be done to bring it reasonably close to that ideal? Is the expenditure of effort necessary to bring about that change justified by the promise of success?

The report of that commission addressed a number of topics, ranging from a sketchy effort to define areas of doctrinal agreement and disagreement to a concern for restructuring religious education and providing adequate training for leaders. But the elements in the report that received most of the attention, centered upon restructuring and reorganizing and streamlining the institutional processes of the Association itself. The effect of the report was to give short shrift to questions of faith, and to focus much more attention on questions of structure and process.

The Commission of Appraisal is widely believed to have saved the American Unitarian Association and to have ushered in a period of renewal and growth. In my reading of the history, it did so by simply assuming Unitarianism has a function in the modern world, even if that function is difficult to define, by finessing any serious conversation about theological concerns and by focusing instead on the question of how to reorganize the national Association so it might be more effective in attracting and retaining members. Out of the work of the commission came a series of initiatives, ranging from the New Beacon Series in Religious Education, to the famous Laymen’s League advertising initiatives based on the question, “Are You a Unitarian Without Knowing It?”, and ultimately the Fellowship Movement.

During this same, period, Universalism was experiencing an even more catastrophic decline in numbers. Once having been described as “the reigning heresy of the day” and credited with being the sixth largest denomination in the country, Universalism had declined to fewer than 50,000 adherents, was closing one rural or small town church after another all over the country, and was watching as one urban church after another either went out of business or merged with its Unitarian counterpart. Universalism responded to that challenge in quite a different way.

Universalists sought to confront the loss of members and the threat to their continued existence by theological exploration. Under the leadership of men like Robert Cummins and Brainard Gibbons, Universalists began to explore their relationship to the Christian tradition out of which they had come. They asked, “What is the essential message of Universalism, given the fact that mainline Protestants are no longer proclaiming doctrines of hellfire and damnation?” They asked, “Does Universalism have anything distinctive to offer to the larger theological conversation?” They asked, “What does Universal Salvation mean in a pluralistic world grown ever more integrated and ever more interconnected?” Cummins, General Superintendent of the Universalist Church, began to address those questions when he told a Universalist General Assembly that: Universalism cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect…..A circumscribed Universalism is unthinkable.

Subsequently, Tracy Pullman of Detroit called for a new understanding of Universalism that would be greater than Christianity. Cummin’s successor as General Superintendent, Brainard Gibbons insisted that Christianity and the larger Universalism were simply incompatible.

These observations led a group of younger ministers to engage the challenge to define a new theological base for the Universalist Church. They advocated what they called a New Universalism–one that sought to define a religion adequate to a global community. They did not seek to create a new world religion, but they dreamed of creating a religion that would be adequate to one world. This led them to engage virtually all the theological categories that had structured their tradition, and seek to determine how to reform that tradition for a new time and a new context. This process continued throughout the years leading up to consolidation.

The point to this long excursion into history is to suggest that Unitarians and Universalists brought quite different agendas to the consolidation. Those differences were reflected in much of the debate surrounding the proposal to consolidate. As I remember those years, I am struck by the fact that much of the Universalist opposition to consolidation was theological in nature– traditionalists like Ellsworth Reamon fearing that the new movement would strengthen the hands of those who sought to move Universalism to an enlarged and non-Christian theological base. On the other hand, much of the Unitarian opposition was institutionally focused–a fear, as A. Powell Davies suggested, that consolidation with the Universalists would slow or halt the numerical growth that had allowed Unitarians to claim to be the fastest growing denomination in American in the 1950′s. I have sometimes summarized the two agendas by suggesting that Universalists brought to merger an important, but unfinished theological concern, while Unitarians brought to merger a set of highly questionable marketing plans.

I would suggest to you that in the years after consolidation, the concern for marketing has triumphed. The overriding concerns have centered upon the need to identify our market niche, and to devise programs and strategies that will attract and keep the clients. Increasingly, much of our social justice effort can be defined as expressionist politics, less intended to change the world than to serve our own egos, to present a profile to the world and attract and expand the client base. Our efforts at self-definition–notably the all-but-deified purposes and principles–are grounded in no deep confession of faith, no significant meta-narrative. They simply hang there as unanchored assertion– not a covenant, but a temporal agreement–and because that is so, they betray the fact that a primary motivating force in their construction was to offend none of our stake holders, while being so general that likely recruits will not find us too challenging.

Our programmatic focus has been upon growth, both in the size and the number of churches. At all levels, programs are initiated and justified on the basis that they will produce numerical growth. Congregations and individuals who question whether growth is an adequate mission are regarded as bordering on the heretical. Education programs are designed specifically to counter and inhibit the essential developmental tasks of young people and to bind them effectively to the church. We have toyed with creating mega-churches by offering something called “theology light seeker services.” We have devised advertising programs structured around slogans like “The Uncommon Denomination” and “The Church That Puts Its Faith In You,” slogans that pretend to communicate but that avoid any careful definition. Most recently, the triumph of marketing can be seen in the process by which the flaming chalice has been transformed from religious symbol into marketing logo.

Missing in all of this is any coherent theological foundation. Over and over, we hear each other and officials of the Association proclaim the conviction that we have a moral obligation to grow, to spread our word because we possess a vital message, one that is of central importance to the world and to the crises in which the world is entangled. When, however, we are challenged to say what that message is, what our faith consists of, what defines us as a religious people, often we are driven to an embarrassed silence, or we smile smuggly and confess that no one can speak for all Unitarian Universalists, or we stutter and stammer and mutter some half digested truisms about the worth of every person or the importance of embracing each person’s freedom to follow his or her own spiritual path.

Those are not wrong affirmations but they provide an incredibly weak foundation for a religious movement and a wholly inadequate program for saving the world. They offer an unexamined piety rather than a solid faith. The unfinished task Universalists brought to consolidation–the effort to redefine the faith tradition in light of contemporary challenges–has been swept away by the fear that if we define ourselves too clearly, someone may be offended.

Nor are we the only example of Liberal Religion trying to survive by fudging uncomfortable self-definitions. In Chicago, and perhaps elsewhere across the country, the United Methodist Church observed Lent, this year, by broadcasting a series of television spots in which people who are lonely, people who are burdened with grief, people who are engulfed by sorrow, are told that they do not have to walk this painful path alone. They will find support and companionship at the United Methodist Church. Except for that last word, “church,” it is hard to tell that the welcome is from a religious community. It sounds very much like an institution offering therapy rather than faith, comfort rather than challenge, sanctuary rather than adventure.

In his book, American Religious Traditions, Richard Wentz suggests that religion “is the dialectic of the sacred and profane,” the way in which the sacred and the mundane are held in “dynamic tension.” He claims that religion “provides the ideas and actions that enable us to maintain the significance of the sacred in circumstances that deny it.” This suggests that a movement that is unwilling or unable to define what it holds sacred has surrendered both its claim to religious significance and its ability to respond meaningfully to the larger world. If we are to respond to the needs of the world from a liberal religious basis, it is critical that we be able to address and answer three central questions: What do we believe? Whom do we serve? To whom or what are we responsible? Several years ago, I was asked to deliver a lecture on the title “Beyond the Seven Principles: The Core of Our Faith.” In that lecture, I suggested that the question of what do we believe cannot be answered adequately until we have struggled with the question, “Whom do we serve?” I am increasingly convinced, now, however, that given the make up of our movement–a movement comprised of people who value education, a movement that reflects a tradition of accommodation to science and embraces concern for creating a tolerant, moral society, a movement that is socially located with access to the levers of power, it is important that the question of what it is we believe, what it is that provides a foundation for a vital religious vision be given priority over the other two.

That first and foundational question, “What do we believe?” is simple, but profoundly challenging for a post modern people. It drives us to consider what are the boundaries of our religious community? What is so central to our identity that we must proclaim it, even at the risk of offending someone? This is the question Universalists were struggling to answer in the years prior to consolidation–the question we have struggled ever since to evade in the interests of more effective marketing. It is in answering that first question that we may discover effective responses to the other two: “Whom do we serve and to whom or what are we responsible?” Ignoring that first question, our institutions are easily seduced by the consumerist imperatives that dominate our times and our response to the world tends to be shallow-rooted, short-lived, self-serving and episodic.

Strange as it may seem to us, the fear of defining ourselves has not always dominated Unitarianism or Universalism. The founding document of American Unitarianism was Channing’s 1819 Baltimore Sermon, “Unitarian Christianity” in which he laid out a clear platform that not only rallied Unitarians, but influenced large numbers of non-Unitarians as well. Later in the same century, when Unitarianism was grappling with the dissent generated by the radicalism of Theodore Parker and his followers, William Channing Gannett offered a statement of “Things Commonly Believed Among Us.” Gannett boldly began his statement by affirming “We believe.” That statement of a central faith helped to heal the divisions within Unitarianism. In 1935 the Universalists, struggling to redefine the movement, adopted a statement that, while not a creed, unashamedly began with these words: “We Avow our Faith.”

Let me suggest to you that what the world needs from Liberal Religion, or at least from our version of Liberal Religion is clarity about who we are and what matters to us; clarity about what vision has called us into being, and what promise we serve. Nor is this such an impossible challenge. While we proudly proclaim the great diversity among us, every study I have seen of Unitarian Universalists suggests that our diversity rests in a powerfully homogeneous core of shared beliefs and attitudes. Indeed, the studies suggest that at the core we are far less diverse than many other religious groups. Let me suggest to you some of the content of that core:

We believe that the universe in which we live and move and have our being is the expression of an inexorable process that began in eons past, ages beyond our comprehension and has evolved from singularity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, from disorder to order.

We believe that the earth and all who live upon the earth are products of the same process that swirled the galaxies into being, that ignited the stars and orbited the planets through the night sky, that we are expressions of that universal process which has created and formed us out of recycled star dust.

We believe that all living things are members of a single community, all expressions of a planetary process that produced life and sustains it in intricate ways beyond our knowing. We hold the life process itself to be sacred.

We believe that the health of the human venture is inextricably dependent upon the integrity of the rest of the community of living things and upon the integrity of those processes by which life is bodied forth and sustained. Therefore we affirm that we are called to serve the planetary process upon which life depends.

We believe that in this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole, that ultimately we all spring from the same source and all journey to the same ultimate destiny.

We believe that the universe outside of us and the universe within us is one universe. Because that is so, our efforts, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions are the dreams, hopes and ambitions of the universe itself. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe is reaching toward self-awareness, toward self consciousness.

We believe that our efforts to understand the world and our place within it are an expression of the universe’s deep drive toward meaning. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe dreams dreams and reaches toward unknown possibilities. We hold as sacred the unquenchable drive to know and to understand.

We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives, luring us to practices of justice and mercy and compassion, is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments.

We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. Life is more than our understanding of it, but the level of our comprehension demands that we act out of conscious concern for the broadest vision of community of we can command and that we seek not our welfare alone, but the welfare of the whole. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation.

We believe that those least like us, those located on the margins have important contributions to make the rest of the community of life and that in some curious way, we are all located on the margins.

We believe that all that functions to divide us from each other and from the community of living things is to be resisted in the name of that larger vision of a world everywhere alive, everywhere seeking to incarnate a deep, implicate process that called us into being, that sustains us in being, that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, that receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Not knowing the end of that process, nonetheless we trust it, we rest in it, and we serve it.

This faith statement is not a creed. (Perhaps we might attach to it the historic Universalist Freedom Clause: Neither this nor any other form of words will be used among us as a creedal test.) Nor can it be easily reduced to an elevator speech. Nonetheless this faith statement attempts to achieve several things.

First of all, it seeks to avoid the morass of hyphenated Unitarian Universalism. Secondly, it seeks to avoid the dreary debate between humanists and theists, between spirituality and rationality, by offering a kind of godless theism–an affirmation that we are not sui generis, that we are products of a natural process we did not create, cannot command and do not understand, but a process to which we are responsible, a process that is grounded in a vision of a dynamic universe, constantly incarnating emergent possibilities and larger alternatives.

It offers a vision that is consistent with our history, our tradition, responsive to the people we serve and to the challenges of our time–a vision grounded in three central enlightment commitments, defined by Susan Neiman as reason, reverence and hope. And, most importantly, it seeks to define a religious position that provides us a distinct location within the spectrum of religious alternatives available to the world.

Perhaps this statement will not prove adequate or acceptable to most of us, but the times demand some kind of formulation of the basis of our faith if we are to be serious about the world and if we are to be taken seriously by the world. Out of this kind of faith statement, imperatives for action emerge that are deeper than a political program or a class or ethnic loyalty. Such a faith statement reminds us that we are called to serve the largest vision of community we can imagine and that all our lesser loyalties stand under the judgment of that great affirmation. In serving the party, the cause, the national or ethnic identity, am I serving the largest community I can envision? In failing the weak, the lost, the marginalized, have I failed my deepest defining obligations? Such a faith statement allows us to recognize that ultimately we are responsible to the larger, sacred context out of which we have come and in terms of which we live. It provides a compass by which to steer amidst the uncertainties of a chaotic world.

This particular statement may not capture adequately the immagination of Unitarian Universalists. I am quite certain that some statement of faith is required if our brand of liberal religion is to address the needs of our world. Why we prefer to focus on our disagreements rather than on a core faith that might define us and might offer a religious alternative, I am not certain. Perhaps it is something deep in our institutional DNA that is at work here. In his two volume history of Unitarianism, Earl Morse Wilbur argued that for most of our history, Unitarians have resisted any real theological definition. Only when faced with some great threat to the continued existence of the movement could Unitarians could brought to define who they were and what vision they served.

I would suggest to you that we face such a threat at this moment in our history. To be sure, the threat does not seem to take the form of repression, persecution, or proscription. Despite the occasional thrust from religious extremists, we are scarcely important enough to justify the effort that repression and persecution would require. The threat to our existence is more subtle and therefore more dangerous. Liberal Religion faces the possibility that it may be overwhelmed by a kind of ambient spirituality that resists definition or institutional form, but functions to use the human longing for meaning to serve other purposes, an ambient spirituality that has no outward focus but slides easily into the therapeutic mode, offering an endless journey of infinite regression into the self. Look around you and you will see everywhere evidence of the manner in which spiritual longing has been commodified, offered on the open market, used to sell everything from soap, to self improvement, to political platforms. Over and over, and over again, the sacred is stripped of its deepest meanings and chained to the chariot wheels of a triumphant consumerism.

By refusing to define itself, Liberal Religion surrenders its ability to stand in judgment on the idolatries of our time. Worse than that, fearing that it will not be taken seriously, Liberal Religion is tempted to try to turn the commercial spirit of the age to its own uses. Oz Guiness has remarked that it used to be the case that religion looked for an audience for its message, but more recently, he suggests, religion looks for a message that will hold the audience.

There is a world of difference between those two approaches. To the degree that Liberal Religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism, in particular, have succumbed to this kind of marketing ploy they have betrayed their own traditions, they have failed the world, they have become captive to the very processes that threaten to destroy our best hope for the future. If we are to serve our people, and the world in which we find ourselves, it is critical that we now take up the unfinished project that Universalism brought to the consolidation in 1961, that we have the courage to define ourselves in ways that offer a clear alternative both to the dangerous and divisive orthodoxies that seem to have capture the religious venture, and the refusal to embrace a clear identity, that threatens to sweep liberal religion into commodified, thumbsucking irrelevance. It is time for liberal religion to declare clearly the faith we hold. The world has a right to expect that of us.

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© Davidson Loehr
 December 9, 2007
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us not sleep through this holiday season. We don’t get a lot of holiday kits – these do-it-yourself or do-it-together chances to come alive. Let us not miss this one.

It isn’t belief that will keep us out, for hardly anyone would even know how to believe the many fantastic parts of this holiday season.

It is, in many ways, such a simple season: lights, candles, music, costumes, decorations, plenty of good food, chances to be present with people we don’t make time for most of the year.

And throughout the holidays, getting together is mostly a chance not to have political fights or once more go down our favorite list of what’s wrong with the world, but a time to try and recapture what’s right with the world, and with our lives and the people who matter to us, or the people we wish were more a part of our lives.

Christmas gives us an easy excuse – even a socially acceptable excuse – to mend bridges, to send an unexpected gift, to wish someone well, to re-establish connections.

Let’s not get so distracted by all the hoopla of the season that we forget that it’s offering us another chance to get caught up in one another, and in being alive.

SERMON: The Real Reason for the Season

Christmas is really quite a new holiday. In our country, it only caught on after the War Between the States – or as some longtime Southerners know it, the War of Yankee Aggression. And in spite of all the hype about Christmas as a religious holiday, many Christians still don’t accept it as having anything to do with Christianity.

Modern Jehovah’s Witnesses and other fundamentalists still see Christmas as a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice. They note that Jesus didn’t tell people to celebrate his birthday in his Sermon on the Mount. In Boston, a fundamentalist religious group has run advertisements in the subway proclaiming that early Christians did not “believe in lies about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, elves and drunken parties.” They don’t mention that early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas either, didn’t have any idea when Jesus was born, or that Jesus also never counseled people to engage in self-righteous games.

It’s kind of ironic, but almost nothing about Christmas that people really love has anything at all to do with Christianity or Jesus. Yet people have been celebrating at this time of year, the winter solstice, since prehistoric times.

Though really, even the winter solstice is mostly an excuse rather than a reason for the season. In our modern calendar, the solstice occurs on 21 or 22 December, though in the old Julian calendar, it sometimes came on December 25th, and was identified with December 25th as far back as the 3rd century, when the Romans had their week-long Saturnalia and the festivals celebrating the birth of the invincible sun, not Jesus.

As far as we can tell, observations and celebrations of the winter solstice may go back 10,000 years – thousands of years before any of today’s religions had been born. In some ancient mythology, the Great Mother Goddess gave birth to a new sun god on that day. Sun gods are pictured with a glow of light, or halo, around their heads. So most of the paintings of Jesus portray him in the stylized way solar deities are portrayed. The solstice was celebrated in many cultures at this time, and by definition that 25th of December – the day the sun was “reborn” – was the birthday of all sun gods, of whom there were many. If you go to Wikipedia, you can find a list of over 100 solar deities, all of whom are “born” each year on the same date – though most of those gods have long since been forgotten. All gods die, and gods who last a few hundred or thousand years have lasted a very long time, as gods go.

So while over a hundred different religious cults and sets of rituals are known, each one of them was a kind of “cover” story over the real reason for the season, which had nothing to do with all those local and temporary gods.

In another twelve days, we will have the shortest day and longest night of the year. Leaves have died and fallen from a lot of trees; it’s been getting dark earlier and getting light later in the day. If we were living through this for the first time, we might think the world was slowly coming to an end, and the light would just continue disappearing until it was completely gone, and we might engage in some pretty desperate hoping.

But this isn’t the season of hoping the sun will come back, and it hasn’t been for over a hundred centuries. It’s the time of knowing the sun will return – after all, they knew exactly which date to plan their parties around, even thousands of years ago, and Stonehenge was built around 4,000 years ago to frame the sun’s rays precisely at the winter and summer solstices. They didn’t hope, they knew. We know full well that the sun will start returning and days will get longer, and we are safe in the hands of Mother Nature, for she will always give birth to the light again. That’s part of the message of this most optimistic of seasons: this is our home, and it’s a safe place for us.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine, whose religion was Mithraism, wanted to combine Mithraism and Christianity. He gave Christians protection from prosecution, but then assigned Mithras’s birthday – December 25th, since Mithras was a sun god – to be celebrated as Jesus” birthday as well, and also assigned Sunday – the day named after the sun god – as the holy day of Christianity. Until then, Christians did not have a holy day. Christian writers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries used to brag about having no holy days, unlike those heretical pagans who were always naming days after their gods – like Sun-day. So officially, Jesus started being born on December 25th in the middle of the fourth century, and we’re still meeting here on Sunday, the holy day of a dozen sun gods whose names we no longer even know. But Christmas didn’t start then, because from the very start, Christians wouldn’t buy it. Even 1700 years ago, they knew it was a pagan holiday about a sun god, so the day just wasn’t an important day for them.

A lot of people are surprised to learn that Christmas wasn’t an important day in modern times, either. But it’s a very recent holiday. In England in the 17th century, the Christian Oliver Cromwell ordered people put in jail if they were caught celebrating Christmas.

And when the Puritans came to America, they would not allow the celebration of Christmas, because they too knew their history. Our Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the first Christmas under our new constitution. Christmas was a normal workday.

Christmas didn’t start catching on in our country until the last third of the 19th century, and then it had almost nothing to do with Jesus, and everything to do with Santa Claus.

In 1822, a dentist named Clement Moore wrote the poem we know as “The Night Before Christmas.” It’s still a magical poem, and it became immensely popular. That’s the poem we all know, about the visit of old Saint Nicholas flying up onto the rooftop in his sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, slipping down the chimney to bring presents to the children, then as he flew away calling out, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” There’s nothing about Jesus or God. Nothing about the winter solstice, either – just jolly old Saint Nicholas, presents, and a wonderful, magical atmosphere. After this poem caught on, the Santa Claus story became very popular.

Then in 1843, Charles Dickens published his Christmas Carol the week before Christmas. The US Congress was still meeting on Christmas. They kept meeting on December 25th as a normal workday until 1856. Meanwhile, the Santa Claus story became more popular, and the idea of Christmas as a special day – a day with family and a big Christmas dinner – caught on over much of the country. Two years after Charles Dickens published his story, in 1836, Alabama was the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. But from the start, as in ancient times, it was about family, friends, sharing good food together, and celebrating – with a big boost from commercialism, just as in ancient Rome.

Christmas cards were introduced in England in 1843 – the same year Dickens published his Christmas Carol. They were simple lithographed cards that said “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

The first Christmas cards in the U.S. were used by merchants for advertising. So making money from this season has been a part of it since it began, as it was also in ancient Rome. We also owe our modern picture of Santa Claus to a cartoonist and a soft drink company.

Thomas Nast was the political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper’s Weekly from 1859-1886. He was born in 1840, so started his career as our country’s first top-quality political cartoonist at the age of nineteen. He gave us both the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey. And in 1863, at the age of 23, he drew Santa Claus dressed in a fur-trimmed suit. Up till then, Santa Claus was usually drawn either as an elf or as a tall thin man. (That’s why it hadn’t strained the imagination so much that Santa could get up and down chimneys.) So Thomas Nast gave us the symbols for Santa Claus and two political parties — and it’s still safe to say that more people love Santa than those other two animals combined. In 1870, Christmas became a federal holiday for the first time, and in 1907 Oklahoma was the last state to make it an official holiday. But as late as 1931, nine states still required public schools to remain open on Christmas day, still saw it as a normal work day.

But this new holiday didn’t have much at all to do with Jesus or God, and everything to do with the ancient festivals and giving presents. And the gifts which have become the main point of the season for all children and many adults were traditionally given on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6th, not Christmas.

St. Nicholas was a real person, a wealthy 4th century bishop known for his generosity – though not really a saint. The most famous legend about him tells of a poor man with three daughters. In those days a young woman’s father had to offer prospective husbands a dowry. The larger the dowry, the better the chance that a young woman would find a good husband. Without a dowry, a woman was unlikely to marry – much as it still is in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries around the Indian continent. This poor man’s daughters, without dowries, were therefore destined to be sold into some kind of slavery.

Mysteriously, on three different occasions, a bag of gold appeared in their home-providing the needed dowries. The bags of gold, tossed through an open window, are said to have landed in stockings or shoes left before the fire to dry. This led to the custom of children hanging stockings or putting out shoes, eagerly awaiting gifts from Saint Nicholas. Sometimes the story is told with gold balls instead of bags of gold. That is why three gold balls are one of the symbols for St. Nicholas. It’s also the origin of the three gold balls that you can still sometimes see hanging outside of pawnshops. St. Nicholas”

Day was celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6th, beginning in 13th century France. So the first part of our modern Christmas to become popular was the gift giving associated with St. Nicholas, but not any story about the birth of Jesus.

But combining gift giving with a religious holiday is like combining fireworks with the celebration of our nation’s declaration of independence on the 4th of July. Guess which one will trump the other one?

Some people in this country were giving gifts for St. Nicholas Day, which had become a secular holiday. But by the end of the 19th century, merchants succeeded in getting people to combine St. Nicholas” Day with December 25th, and give the gifts for Christmas, to help focus the shopping season. Earlier, Christmas gifts were almost always made by hand to give to your family and friends. But between about 1880 and 1920 merchants managed to sell us on the idea that they should be bought, and gift-wrapped in fancy paper. In the 1930s, they got President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving back from its former date of November 30th, to November 23rd, so there would be a longer Christmas shopping season. A few years later, Congress made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November, and the Christmas shopping season has officially started the day after Thanksgiving since then “though now it seems the Christmas ads start after Halloween.

You notice that so far, Jesus, God and Christianity have hardly been mentioned at all. Our modern Christmas was begun by storytellers, cartoonists and merchants, creating the shopping season that is the most profitable time of the year for them. It features holly, ivy, mistletoe, evergreens, fir trees, and the lights and fires and parties that go back to before Christianity existed, probably to before any religion still alive existed. But also notice that none of these stories talk about the winter solstice, either.

Our favorite Christmas music isn’t religious, either, though our favorite music comes at Christmas. The Number One selling record of all time is still Bing Crosby’s 1942 version of “White Christmas,” and the Number Two selling record of all time is still Gene Autrey’s 1949 recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

The single most important picture that established our image of old Santa Claus as the fat guy with the white beard in the red suit with white fur trim wasn’t by the political cartoonist Thomas Nast who started it, but another commercial artist. For 33 years, from 1931 to 1964, the Coca-Cola Company published ads picturing this fat Santa in his red suit and white fur, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. Then in 1957, Dr. Seuss published his story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, a kind of cartoon version of the Scrooge character. And again, the “Christmas spirit” the Grinch had tried to steal wasn’t about religion, but about parties, celebration, giving presents and having a wonderful time together.

Today, Christmas has become an almost completely secular holiday. That even seems to be becoming the law. In 1999 a US District court ruled that Christmas decorations didn’t violate anybody’s religious beliefs because as they put it, “The Christian holiday has become almost completely secularized.” One of the great ironies of Christmas is that it really isn’t a Christian holiday – or even a religious holiday – at all. It is, as that court said, a secular holiday, just as St. Nicholas Day was and St. Valentine’s Day is.

So all the focus on gifts, merriment, meals with friends, singing, evergreens, mistletoe isn’t distracting from the reason for the season. It is the reason for the season, and has been for thousands of years before any of the world’s religions had been invented.

From all of the ancient and modern histories, whether around Rome or around the U.S., it looks like the real reason for the season was the need to celebrate, to get together with family and friends, to surround ourselves with merriment, and to just come alive. That’s a victory of the human imagination, inventing the brightest holiday in the midst of Nature’s longest nights.

What this season has been about since prehistoric times is coming alive. Early Christians said that the old Roman Saturnalia had parties, drinking, good food, singing, dancing and laughter – as though that were a bad thing. But remember, most of this partying was done with their families and friends. The winter solstice was an excuse for it, just as the 4th of July is an excuse for shooting off fireworks. But the solstice wasn’t the real reason, any more than any holiday is. We love holidays because they give us permission to come alive more theatrically and openly than we can do the rest of the year without being seen as a bit odd.

During 4th of July fireworks displays, all those “Oooohs” and “Aaaaahs” you hear when the fireworks go off aren’t in memory of a bunch of men signing a declaration of independence. They are the delighted gasps of our inner children, thrilled with being alive and being together. And that’s the real reason for the Christmas season, too.

I keep thinking of the wonderful words from theologian Howard Thurman, when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I had never thought of them as having anything to do with Christmas, and doubt that he meant for them to be. But they are about what this season is really about.

This is the most creative, positive and human of all our holidays. Fifty or a hundred centuries ago, some people were facing another solstice season. The days were short, the nights were long, and it could look like the end of the world. They knew it wasn’t – the world isn’t likely to end unless we boil it away or blow it apart. But once they started lighting fires, somebody got a very creative idea: let’s have a party! Let’s do an in-your-face to Nature, by having our biggest, brightest party right in the middle of Nature’s most dismal days!

There were other facts that made this a perfect time for huge feasts. They often slaughtered many of their cattle at this time, so they wouldn’t have to feed them throughout the winter – so there was a lot of fresh meat available for the feast. And the wine they had made last summer was finally ready to drink. Well, that’s a sign from the gods!

The best parts of nature have always been claimed by the mythmakers of the day for their particular story. In ancient Rome, the official storytellers said what’s going on here is the birth of that invincible sun. A few blocks away in the neighborhoods of Mithraism, they said no, it’s really the birth of Mithras, who was both the sun god and the Son of God. Disciples of Apollo would claim the time for him, and remind you that the only reason the sun even comes up in the morning is because Apollo drags it across the sky behind his golden chariot.

Then after the fourth century, Christian mythmakers said No; it was the celebration of the birth of another Son of God named Jesus that just happened to come on the birthday of Mithras and all the other sun gods. Then they connected it with the earlier story about Joseph and Mary, a wandering star, shepherds and wise men, and the rest of it.

These are all such wonderful stories! They are far more imaginative stories than the truth, which is pretty dull: “Well, the days will start getting longer for six months, then they’ll get shorter for six months, and they’ll probably keep doing that forever, as they’ve been doing on this planet for over four billion years. Now there’s a boring story! Nobody is lining up to see that movie!

Meanwhile, back on earth, a lot of people are getting ready to party. They’ve preparing a menu, inviting friends, deciding on the right gifts for the right people, whether they make them or buy them. They’re picking out fancy wrapping paper, hanging all sorts of things on real or artificial green trees – a lot like people did in ancient Rome, in the communities of Mithraism – the fir tree was Mithra’s sacred tree – and in more times and places than we can count. That’s the real reason for the season: a rare chance to come alive, to celebrate the gift of life by offering gifts to those in life who mean a lot to you, a chance for good food, good friends, and family who, if we can’t quite love having them around for the holidays, can at least tolerate them in good humor, and hope they return the favor.

It’s a time to get out not only our best behaviors, but some of our silliest and most child-like behaviors, too. My god, this is the season when full-grown people talk about flying reindeer, take their children to a million malls to sit on Santa’s lap, then line up and pay good money to see that ballet with mice that dance, and a magical nutcracker who comes to life.

“Comes to life.” That’s it. The real reason for this season has always been coming back to life. Not coming to worship the invincible sun, not coming to Mithras, not coming to Jesus, but coming to life. And all the stories, music, costumes, decorations and parties are like training wheels for us, to help us get back into that habit of being more alive – a habit we seem to slip out of so easily that it’s a good thing we have arranged this annual reminder that more than anything, what the world needs is people who have come alive.

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© Davidson Loehr
November 11, 2007
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us be honorable and courageous stewards of the lives of our soldiers. Let us match their willingness to go where we aim them, by making sure that the cause is worthy of their lives, and of our own highest ideals. They trust us with their lives, and that is not a figure of speech. We ask them not to flinch in the face of possible death; let us not flinch in the face of what may be uncomfortable truths.

May we learn from our veterans that there is something noble, even sacred, about putting our lives in the service of honest and high ideals, no matter the risk. It is our duty as citizens to insure that the ideals our armies are really serving are as high and noble as those our soldiers think they are serving. And the pursuit of that may require from all of us a quality of courage like that shown by our soldiers in their wars. May we find that courage, and be reconnected with those highest ideals.

Amen.

SERMON: Our Soldiers: Armed Corporate Mercenaries?

This contentious sermon title was inspired by the words of a remarkable soldier of 75 years ago. A Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, he was one of only seven men ever to win the Medal of Honor twice, and one of only two to win it for two different occasions (the other five were given two medals for the same action – the feeling being that they were exceptionally courageous. After WWI the rules were changes, so that the Medal of Honor could be awarded only once per soldier. So General Smedley Butler will forever be one of only two men who were awarded the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions.) I’ve read that he was one of the most respected veterans by other soldiers, which was partly due to his courage both on and off the battlefield. It’s his courage off the battlefield that interests me today. On August 21, 1931, General Butler stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

“I spent 33 years – being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism”. “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street”. “In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested”. I had – a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions”. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.” (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 93)

Now I’m a veteran of the Vietnam War, and I would never want to think of myself as a corporate mercenary. Our dangerous private army of Blackwater today has plenty of people who seem proud to be corporate mercenaries in Iraq, but I suspect nearly all of our real soldiers would be appalled at the idea, as I would be. Still, General Butler certainly didn’t hate soldiers, and he didn’t hate America. In a story we should all have learned in school but didn’t, he was approached in 1934 by a messenger from a consortium of wealthy men, offered a suitcase full of $1,000 bills as a down payment if he would assemble an army, take over the White House, and install himself as America’s first fascist dictator. Instead, he went before Congress to tell the story. That testimony was filmed, and I’ve watched part of it. He was a genuine American hero. Yet in spite of his public testimony, the group of wealthy corporate men were powerful enough that not even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have them prosecuted, and influential enough that as far as I know, the story has been kept out of history texts for all high school and almost all college courses, to this day. So maybe there is something to what he said. A second person whose writing has both irritated and persuaded me is John Perkins. I read his book (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man two years ago, and it made me feel like I’d been a naive and gullible child for decades – though I also thought he had eagerly worked at a slimy job only a sociopath could love, for a whole decade. But he too talked about how our soldiers are routinely used as pawns of some of our most powerful corporate and political interests in a game of American Empire, against the high ideals for which our country supposedly stands.

So on this Veterans Day, I want to take our soldiers seriously enough to explore this story of American empire, the role soldiers have been used to play in it, and the role we all play in it. The hope is that the truth can help make us more free, though I have no idea how, in the real world, to change a story that’s been part of us for so long. Our country was begun by the Puritans as a nation chosen by God with a “manifest destiny” to rule the world. John Winthrop used the concept of “manifest destiny,” without using the specific words, in his 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity,” written while aboard the flagship Arbella on his way to this country. His phrasing was that we shall be “as a city on a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Carried in this was the belief that God had set us apart and above others. The phrase “manifest destiny” wasn’t coined until 1839 by John L. O”Sullivan, but the seeds of the concept go back to our very beginnings. So the dream of a worldwide empire – and a Christian empire – goes back nearly four hundred years. Eventually, such a dream would have to require soldiers as the weapons and as the cost. As Gen. Smedley Butler said, war is a racket in which the profits are counted in dollars and the losses are counted in lives. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, was used to take Manifest Destiny a step further when, in the 1850s and 1860s, it was used to assert that the US had special rights all over the hemisphere, including the right to use our soldiers to invade any nation in Central or South America that refused to back our economic demands – usually referred to as our “vital interests.” President Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify US intervention in the Dominican Republic, in Venezuela, and stealing Panama from Colombia. A string of subsequent US presidents relied on it to expand Washington’s Pan-American activities through the end of WWII. And during the latter half of the 20th century, the US used the Communist threat to claim the right of invading countries around the world, including Vietnam and Indonesia. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 61)

The 20th century was fueled by oil, as this one still is. As our own oil fields began running out, we became dependent on Middle Eastern oil. But since we needed it, we believed – as we always have – that we had a right to it. This bi-partisan greed was stated very dramatically by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address, when he said, “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Although he referred to “outside force,” the policy has equally applied to actors within the Middle East itself – as was seen in the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 – and it is playing out now in the crisis over Iran. (A Game as Old as Empire, p. 140) These are insights and patterns from John Perkins, who is for me the most important and readable author for understanding how our American empire works, what’s going on behind the scenes, and the role our soldiers are assigned in the grand scheme. Perkins worked for a decade as one of a group of people known among themselves as Economic Hit Men. Here’s what he says about them, and I’ll quote him because some of his persuasiveness comes from his confessional (and arrogant) style:

“We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to [those who run] our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. “Like our counterparts in the Mafia, we provide favors [to those whose cooperation we are buying]. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xvii) “However – and this is a very large caveat – if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we refer to as the jackals (professional assassins). The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.” And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq, then young Americans are sent in to kill and to die. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. xxi) Perkins says they channeled funds from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their sister organizations into schemes that appeared to empower developing countries and serve the poor while primarily benefiting a few wealthy people. They would identify a developing country that had resources our corporations wanted (such as oil), arrange a huge loan for that country, and then direct most of the money to our own engineering and construction companies – and a few collaborators in the developing country. Infrastructure projects, such as power plants, airports, and industrial parks, sprang up; however, they seldom helped the poor, who were not connected to electrical grids, never used airports, and lacked the skills required for employment in industrial parks. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3)

“At some point we returned to the indebted country and demanded our pound of flesh: cheap oil, votes on critical United Nations issues, or troops to support ours someplace in the world, like Iraq.” (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 3) The loans were used as a tool for enslaving these countries, not empowering them. If they wouldn’t bite at the bait of loans, jackals – assassins – were sent into replace uncooperative leaders with cooperative ones. And as Perkins says, world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in – as it did in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 5) The most dramatic instance of this before our two invasions of Iraq happened in Panama, a story that seems not to have been covered or understood very well.

We had trained General Manuel Noriega at our School of the Americas, in the methods of terror and violence, so we saw him as an easy mark. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had signed a treaty with Panama giving control back to the Panamanians after 1999 as originally agreed. And when Noriega became president of Panama, he refused to bow to Reagan administration demands that the Panama Canal Treaty be renegotiated giving the US control. Instead, Noreiga negotiated with Japanese to see about rebuilding the canal with Japanese money. This was, of course, their legal right. But it would frustrate our dream of empire – the dream to which we’ve felt so singularly entitled. So on December 20, 1989, the first President Bush had our soldiers attack Panama with what was reported to be the largest airborne assault on a city since WWII. It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population which killed between 2,000 and 3,000, and injured an estimated 25,000. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the US or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral US action as a clear violation of international law. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, pp. 175-176) We even kidnapped the president of Panama and put him in American jail as our only “prisoner of war” for frustrating our economic ambitions. You can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t spin it around enough times to clean it up. It was illegal, immoral and murderous. We killed people because we wanted to steal from them. In this country, that crime is called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, it’s a capital offense. Our soldiers were used in this invasion, not to serve freedom or democracy, but simply to serve the economic interests that brought great profit to quite a small number of wealthy investors, which is one dimension of our American empire, our “manifest destiny.” Then came our first invasion of Iraq, also done under the first President Bush. Why Iraq? It had nothing to do with 9-11, of course – those lies have all been exposed and aired too often to need repeating.

We know the current Bush administration had talked about wanting to invade Iraq since the first week they were in power in January of 2001. But the West has been trying to grab Iraq’s oil since 1918. Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not just about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq; so, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources. During the 1980s, the importance of water – politically and economically – was becoming obvious to us”. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 183) Also, Iraq is in a very strategic location. It borders Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, and has a coastline on the Persian Gulf. It is within easy missile-striking distance of both Israel and Russia. Military strategists equate modern Iraq to the Hudson River valley during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, the French, British and Americans knew that whoever controlled the Hudson River valley controlled the continent. Today, it is common knowledge that whoever controls Iraq holds the key to controlling the Middle East. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184)

By the late 1980s, it was apparent that Saddam was not buying into the Economic Hit Man scenario. This was a major frustration and a great embarrassment to the first Bush administration. Like Panama, Iraq contributed to George HW Bush’s wimp image. As Bush searched for a way out, Saddam played into his hands. On 25 July 1990, Saddam invited US Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to a meeting, and sounded her out about Kuwait. Here’s part of her response, from a transcript of their meeting: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (NY Times International, Sunday September 23, 1990, p. 19)

A week later, on August 2nd, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Bush, incredibly, responded with a denunciation of Saddam for violating international law, even though it had been less than a year since Bush himself had staged the illegal and unilateral invasion of Panama. (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184) The Economic Hit Men tried to convince Saddam to accept a deal similar to the deal we had made with Saudi Arabia. But Saddam kept refusing. If he had complied, like the Saudis, he would have received our guarantees of protection as well as more US-supplied chemical plants and weapons. When it became obvious that he was entrenched in his independent ways,

Washington sent in the jackals. Assassinations of men like Saddam usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards”. Saddam understood jackals and their techniques. He had been hired by the CIA in the sixties to assassinate a predecessor, Qasim, and had learned from us, his ally, during the eighties. He screened his men rigorously. He also hired look-alike doubles. His bodyguards were never sure if they were protecting him or an actor. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211) So the first President Bush sent in the US military. At this point the White House did not want to take Saddam out. He was, after all, our type of leader: a strongman who could control his people and act as a deterrent against Iran – as well as controlling the religious factions in Iraq, which we’ve never been able to do. The Pentagon assumed that by destroying his army, they had chastised him; now he would come around. The Economic Hit Men went back to work on him during the nineties. Bill Clinton imposed sanctions to remain in effect until Saddam agreed to US terms of ownership of their oil.

Clinton’s sanctions killed an estimated one million Iraqis – half of them children: this remains a completely bipartisan American imperialism. (Many will remember the chilling interview with Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, where she was asked about our sanctions causing the deaths of over half a million children. She said, “We think it’s worth the price.”) But Saddam wouldn’t give control of Iraqi oil to American or other foreign corporations. Assassinations were attempted, and once more they failed.

So in 2003, a second President Bush deployed the military. Saddam was deposed and executed. (The Secret History of the American Empire, p. 211)

Then Haliburton, Bechtel and other well-connected corporations got billions of dollars in unbid contracts, just as they had in so many other countries. When this happened, John Perkins finally decided to write his book exposing the game he had once been a part of. Twenty-six publishers refused to touch it. Finally, a small publisher in San Francisco took it. The book was an almost immediate best-seller. Perkins then contacted twelve other people who had worked in the empire game, had them each write a chapter, and brought out a second book called A Game as Old as Empire. Then he wrote a sequel to (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which he brought out this year, under the title The Secret History of the American Empire. I recommend all three books to anyone interested in these issues. Our game of empire always has the same three steps. First, we try to use heavy-handed persuasion – mostly economic – to bring a country’s assets under our control. If that fails, we try to assassinate its leader – a tactic which has worked in many countries for us. If that fails, we send in our soldiers. So this seems to be how our dream of manifest destiny works today, and how both assassins and our soldiers are used not just to make those who run a few US corporations rich – that’s too clean to be realistic – but also to give us the benefits we call the American Way of Life.

See how this picture Perkins draws brings together a lot more data than our mainstream political and news stories, and ties them into a scheme that has a simple clear plot that makes, I think, far more real-world sense than the spin we’ve been fed? It isn’t a picture I’d ever had or wanted, any more than I’d thought of war as a racket or soldiers as pawns. But so many other people are affected, I think we owe it to them, to our soldiers and to ourselves to consider this darker picture and become far better-informed about it.

We are complicit in so many things we don’t want to think about because it feels like it pollutes our life. But then I remember the 4,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq, the tens of thousands who have been wounded, and the estimated two million Iraqis we have killed since 1991, in order to take their oil and to start taking control, we hope, of the Middle East and, through controlling the world’s oil supply, to dictate terms to the world. It sounds like a very bad movie script written by very arrogant and immoral people within our government, a script in which our soldiers are being assigned key roles, but not noble roles.

John Perkins goes into many more details in other areas of what our American empire looks like in and to the rest of the world, and I’ll revisit him in two weeks. But war and imperialism, no matter how awful they may be, just aren’t what life is mostly about. Life is mostly about its healthy parts: living, loving, hoping and trusting, making things of meaning and beauty, and learning to enjoy being with one another and giving thanks for being alive. Some of you may know of this story from Will Durant. Durant was the historian whose life work was writing about a dozen-volume “Story of Civilization,” an ultra-ambitious task for one man and his wife. After writing those millions of words, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to sum up the giant set. And late in his life, he was asked to sum up civilization in half an hour. He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

we’ve been wading in the river here. Nobody can live that way, and nobody should live that way. It’s being defeated by the tragedies that are often the background against which we are challenged to live our lives. This always reminds me of another story, one I experienced in Vietnam. We had shelled a small hamlet by mistake, taking out about two of the half dozen huts. Driving by a day or two later, we could see some of the damage. In one family the father had been killed, the wife wounded, a young daughter had part of her arm blown off and was wearing bandages covering both eyes. It was heart-wrenching and shameful to us. About three weeks later we drove by those huts again. The thatched roofs had been repaired. And out in the yard were the injured mother, her young son, and her one-armed blind daughter. They were laughing and dancing, playing and singing. Some of us wept bitterly. They were living on the banks; we were caught in the river. The challenge of life is to know the river, but not to let it poison our life on the banks. So next week, for Thanksgiving, Dina and I will each share a homily, and I’ll share some very optimistic, hands-on, actual real-world things we can do in a lot of different ways to help those serving the high ideals we prefer.

For now, thank you again for your service, veterans. And something more. I know that when you served, you believed, as I also did, that we really were serving high ideals and noble causes, not just imperialistic greed and sociopathic empire-building. It may seem hard to fathom, but as a combat photographer and Press Officer in Vietnam forty years ago, I believed what I was told. I attended briefings by General Westmoreland, and thought I had heard the word straight from the top. I believed we were there to serve high ideals, though the violence and blood confused and eventually kind of paralyzed me. Most of us believed what we were told. It’s how we served with pride and integrity. It was those high ideals and noble causes that made our service memorable to us – sometimes even sacred, as mine was to me. And I believe, as I think you do, that if we can find a way to convert our nation back to high and noble ideals, it can transform our nation’s soul back to something noble, perhaps even sacred.