Chalice Notes

Sermon - "Engaged Democracy"

2012-01-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

Engaged Democracy
Today we are talking about democracy, “engaged democracy” to be more specific. When I say that word, “democracy,” there are likely two different things that come to people’s minds. Some people are reminded of a political system, specific structures in a government, a constitution, checks and balances. Other people hear the word democracy and they think of people on the ground educating themselves and organizing, creating what they want their world to look like from the bottom up.
In religious terms it’s actually a whole lot like the concept of the Beloved Community, or the Kingdom of God. There are two very different perspectives on the idea of the kingdom of God. One is that we are compelled to create a beloved community wherever and whenever we can. It is our on our shoulders to create justice and peace, and through that creation, we usher the divine into our midst. Undoubtedly this is the camp that most Unitarian Universalists fall in.
But there is another perspective on the beloved community. And not quite as many, but still a lot of UU’s fall into this category. These are the folks who believe that our personal relationship with God or the divine is of primary concern. And once we align that primary relationship, that spirituality and encourage others to do the same, then the kingdom of God, and the beloved community will come into being.
One perspective depends on individual action to make a path for a higher power to be present in our community, the other depends largely on that higher power being present, and us arranging ourselves in a way that reflects it.

And we can think of Democracy in much the same way, especially in our country. I imagine the lines are similarly split. Most of us believe that democracy is something that we the people must create room for. It’s about individuals learning and making decisions. But another camp, and in many ways and equally valid camp, is invested in the institutions of democracy: the offices held by our leaders, the Constitution, the political process.
Of course both are necessary, both voices are needed. We need to engage from the ground up. But there is also room for celebrating the ideals that our government is based on. It is increasingly popular to rail against our government, particularly in recent years with financial crisis, lingering wars, and corporate influence tainting the process. American politics are a bit of a mess right now. But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if rather than saying “they’re all a bunch of back-stabbing losers,” we said, “you know we’re disappointed. Our institutions are better than this, and you as individuals are smarter and better than this.” What if rather than condemning our leaders, we simply said we know you are capable of doing better.
Don’t get me wrong. I do not think American democracy is perfect. But I do think that the founding principle is a good one. I do think that that political system has tremendous potential. I do think that many brilliant men and women have invested their lives in a career of public service. Do you remember that, when we used to call politicians public servants?

I do my best to come up with catchy titles for my sermons. Sometimes it works, other times not so well. I’m feeling like this week, is a “not so well” week. That’s because the title of this sermon “engaged democracy” is totally redundant. Any functional democracy, whether it is large or small has to be an engaged one. Once people stop taking an interest in the decisions their leaders make, and once leaders of a community lose interest in what the people want, democracy has lost its hold.
Maybe “engaging democracy” would have been a better title. But Engaged Democracy is just redundant. By its very nature, democracy demands participation to exist. It is inherently an engaged system of government.
Democracy must be engaged from the top down and from the bottom up. That raises the obvious question, “how can we, each one of us, engage our democracy?” A little reminder of civic duty never hurts. So here we go:
The first and most obvious way is to vote. But don’t just go in secretly and quietly. Make sure your family and your friends vote as well, even the ones that you know may vote the other way. It’s astounding to me how low our voter turn out is, especially as a country that so prides itself on being a model of freedom. We had 57% percent that at the polls for the 2008 presidential election. And that was the biggest turn out in forty years. I’m typically not a big fan of pressuring people to do things. But encouraging people to vote isn’t about pushing your own political agenda. It’s about encouraging a healthy society.
And, voting requires more than walking into a voting booth and making a random choice. Participating in democracy requires a certain level of awareness. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to get meaningful news about political issues. News sources from both the right and the left have become echo chambers. They repeat to their consumer exactly what they want to hear to reinforce and already established opinion about any given issue. The job of education ourselves is getting harder, but it is still ours. You don’t have to be a political analyst, but read a newspaper now and again. And, try to pick up a news source that is not necessarily reinforcing your viewpoint. You might be surprised by what you learn.
Of course there are also voter guides to help navigate the tangle of ballot initiatives that come up in California. Both the League of Women Voters, and Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California produce a guide every time there are initiatives on the ballot. And we offer those here at the Fellowship.
And finally, you can donate your time and money to organizations that promote democratic values. Of course you can support the particular issues and candidates, as I know many of you do. But also consider using some of those resources to encourage the democratic process as a whole. Several different organizations work to enhance American democracy. And they all need your support.

Hopefully it has not been completely lost on you that these are also the things that we need to engage here in this congregation. Most of what we ask for explicitly is money. And that is important. The members and friends of this Fellowship give a lot to keep us going. But just like participating in democracy in the wider world, there is more than money involved, or at least there should be more than money involved if we are going to be a healthy community.
Following our service today is our Annual Meeting. This is the one time each year that members of the Fellowship vote to approve our annual budget and to elect our leadership for the coming year. It may not seem like that big of a deal, like someone else will vote for you. But please consider how you feel about people saying that about our wider democracy. “I’m sure other people will vote and take care of it.” Our health as a community depends on engagement from the members and from the leaders. This meeting is the primary moment when that engagement occurs.
So please stay for the annual meeting after worship. And I have one more request from you for the sake of our community. Educate yourself about what’s going on in the life of our community and read the newsletter. It may not seem necessary. Maybe you think you will hear about the big important stuff anyway. But we cannot have a one on one phone call with each member. A team of people works very hard to publish good information in the newsletter and announcements. We publish put out as much news as possible, but we need you to meet us half way and read it.

It’s the only way to really stay informed about the decisions that we face as a community. It’s also the best way to find out about the decisions and changes we face as well as all of the events that we put on.
This past Wednesday we had a screening of the award-winning documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” It’s an in-depth look at the civil rights movement. I had probably seen it four times in school growing up, but it’s wonderful to watch as an adult. The most remarkable part of this film is the amount of original footage that it uses. You hear the voices and see videos of all the action, from interviews with a young Rosa Parks to the Governor of Mississippi insisting on the holiness of segregation and the state’s legal right to enforce.
As we were watching Wednesday night, one speech in particular stood out for me. It was a young, I want to say 26 year old, Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd at the very beginning of the bus boycott in Montgomery. He spoke beautifully about the struggle they were about to embark on. And it was a struggle. Boycotting the bus meant walking miles to work every day for over a year. He reminded them that the struggle wasn’t just for Blacks in Selma, or just for Blacks in the United States. It was a struggle for justice.
In grade school I was taught about King’s work to end segregation in the South. We learned that that was his mission, and that was all. It wasn’t until much later that I learned King’s vision of justice was an expansive one. He moved far beyond the struggle for integration to speak about the crushing poverty of Blacks throughout America. And he was one of the most powerful voices criticizing the horrors of the Vietnam War.
I knew that he personally expanded his vision of justice throughout his career. But I didn’t know that from the very beginning, from the time Rosa Parks stayed in her seat on the bus, he knew that it was about more than busses, or Blacks. He knew that justice was an expansive thing. When it took hold in one place, it could ripple out around the world.
And I think the same is true for us, and the democracy that we support. This may sound a little grandiose, but hear me out. I think engaging in our church community makes a difference for democracy in the wider world. I don’t think that having our annual meeting here in 20 minutes will usher in sweeping democratic reform in China. But I do think, actually I know, that what we do here affects the lives of our members. When we care enough to engage our community, to look at a budget, and care about our leaders, we expand our personal capacity for democratic life. It may be miniscule on an individual level, but when the 85 members of our congregation expand their capacity for democracy, that change isn’t so tiny.
What we do here impacts our lives when we leave this building. If it doesn’t, then we are failing miserably as a church. I believe, and I have heard our members say, that being active in the community impacts how they think and feel and act in the outside world. And I deeply hope that one of those impacts in an increased sense of responsibility for maintaining a community that rests on democratic principles.

Democracy is a dynamic thing. It requires action, it must be engaged. And Democracy is expansive. Like King’s vision of justice, when we support democracy in small scale, we make it more possible on a large scale. In closing I want to talk a little bit about why this all matters. Why do the work to create it? Why does it matter if it spreads? Well Democracy matters because it is central to our faith. As Unitarian Universalists, and generally as Americans, we believe in democracy.
I have preached time and again about how Unitarian Universalism is a reflection of the democracy as established in the United States. Everything about our structure reflects the democratic ideals and operations of the wider country. But I’m talking about not our faith tradition, but our personal faith. Whether you realize it or not, you and I believe in democracy.
That may sounds ideological, but it is true. In different places and in different times people have organized society based on what they believed to be true about God and about themselves. Not so long ago, and still in many places today, a sovereign ruler had power over the land. That individual was endowed by God with the power and the ability to lead a people. That one individual was believed to have been different, above others in his or her ability and knowledge.
Some movements within Islam have faith in a different kind of political order. They believe that the laws written and derived from the holy book, the Koran, should be the foundation of society. They believe that a particular set of rules is necessary to maintain social order and to revere Allah.
But you and I believe something different, about the divine and the human. We sang about it earlier in our worship service. “Voice still and small, deep inside all, I hear you call, singing. In joy and pain, sorrow and rain, still WE’LL remain, singing.” We believe that each and every person has a conscience, a voice within that leads them toward doing the right thing. “Voice still and small, deep inside all, I hear you call, singing.” No individual, not matter how great or powerful, is entitled to silence that voice. No ancient law, not matter how wise, is more sacred than the voices of today.
Democracy is at the core of our faith tradition. More importantly, democracy rings true for what you and I believe to be true about our fellow human beings, and the sacred. It is where you own personal faith and belief rests. The way we organize ourselves is a reflection of our values and our faith. Some will tell you that Democracy is the most reasonable form of government, or that capitalism is the most productive economic system for generating growth.
But I want to tell you today that democracy is, more than an efficient or productive form of government. Democracy is what we believe to be true and right. And that truth, that rightness is why it is the responsibility of each on of us to participate.

-Amen-

Sermon -"The Vocabulary of Unitarian Universalism"

2012-01-02T16:36:00.001-08:00

Vocabulary of Unitarian Universalism

Unitarian Universalism is a liberal faith tradition based in covenant between its members. That is a pretty loaded sentence, but it is a very good description of who we are. Unitarian Universalism is a liberal faith tradition based in covenant between its members.
This Sunday I want to unpack some of the words that we frequently use to talk about Unitarian Universalism. Some of them can be very misleading. I know people start to cringe with the word liberal, like it’s a political agenda. We’re not quite sure what a covenant is. And Over and over we call ourselves a denomination, which we really aren’t. So I want to look at some of that language and the way we talk about ourselves. The point of course isn’t a vocabulary lesson. It’s to help us understand a more deeply who we are as a community.

The first word that I want to talk about is a fairly innocuous one. It is “tradition.” I often call Unitarian Universalism a faith tradition and some people aren’t quite sure how to interpret that. Lots of people refer to Unitarian Universalism as a denomination. Even other ministers use the word denomination sometimes, but it is very misleading, and I would go so far as to say an incorrect way of talking about us.
The word denomination implies being a part of a subset. We know that money comes in different denominations, different amounts. And there are Jewish denominations, and Muslim denominations, and Christian denominations. The problem is, we don’t fit as a subset of a faith other than our own.
It is true, and important to remember that Unitarian Universalism grew out of a Christian history. In fact the initial arguments made for both Unitarian and Universalist theologies were rooted firmly in the Christian Bible. They were Christian Unitarians. In fact in February we will be hearing from a UU minister who will share with us a very Christian understanding of Universalism. We come from a Christian history, but we are no longer a Christian denomination. Since the early 19th Century we have fully embraced experiencing the divine in all sorts of different places, including in Eastern religious teachings.
So it is important to remember, there are Christian Unitarian Universalists, and there are Jewish UUs, and Buddhist UUs, and Humanist UUs and Pagans, and Atheists, and everything else under the sun.
Though we are quite small in number, just around 630,000 in the United States, we are better understood as a faith or a faith tradition, than as a denomination, because we are not a subset, or denomination of a larger group. So, you will hear me referring to Unitarian Universalism as a faith tradition. We are not a denomination; we are a faith tradition.

As often is the case, one sticky word clings to another. Although we are getting better about it as a congregation, the word “faith” still gets a little stuck in our throats sometimes. What does it mean for us to have faith, or be a part of a faith tradition?
It does not mean that we all have faith in a conscious God who intervenes in human history. It means that we are about the business of finding something to believe in. It may be God, or it may not, but it is our mission as a faith community to find some foundation for our lives.

Many of us, most of us actually, come to Unitarian Universalism after having left another faith. We found that we could no longer say those words, or believe those things. We could no longer accept a political agenda. We made the brave and sometimes very difficult decision to turn away from a belief system and a community. And now here we are together. Refugees, the departed, seeking support and nurturing for our wounds.
But this is not the final purpose of our community. Healing the wounds inflicted by our religious past is not enough. Our goal here is to move beyond naming what we do not believe in or do not want. Our goal here is to begin to embrace a faith in something broader than ourselves, something that does bring meaning to our lives.
Besides, a community that can only focus on what it doesn’t want simply doesn’t work. Can you imagine trying to order off then menu in a restaurant and only telling your waiter what you don’t like. Or imagine going shopping with a friend who only says, “oh, that doesn’t look so good on you.” Or, perhaps playing a sport where the only reinforcement you get is negative. I don’t like that kind of food. That dress looks terrible on you. Don’t hit the ball that way… It would be a pretty miserable group of people.
Our goal as a faith community is to move beyond the pains of the past to find a belief system that enriches our lives. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean believing in God. But it does mean believing in something larger than ourselves. It could be a belief in the power of life in nature, the power of love and human community, our highest ideals; any one of these things could be the foundation for your faith.
And it’s important to be clear that having faith isn’t an end in itself. Faith in something means having a foundation that brings perspective to our lives. When we believe deeply in something bigger than ourselves we come to a sense of humility, understanding that we a just pieces of a much larger puzzle. And hopefully our faith also brings a level of comfort, as we realize that that puzzle that we are a piece of, that web that supports us, is a life-affirming network of love and possibility.

We are a faith tradition that embraces, encourages even, a tremendous diversity of beliefs. Which presents us with a pretty unique challenge as a church. Our community cannot be built upon a set of shared theological beliefs, a creed. So instead, we build our community around a covenant. We are a faith tradition rooted in a covenant.
More than any of the other words I’m talking about today, covenant is the most often used and misunderstood in our tradition. A covenant is a very specific type of relationship that goes back to the roots of the establishment of religious communities in colonial America. Without a shared creed, covenant is what holds us together.
We often think of a covenant like a contract, and they are similar. But, a covenant is different from a contract in three important ways. First, a covenant has no termination date, whereas a contract usually does. We rarely talk about FOREVER anymore. The major way we see covenant in this sense today is in marriage. Two people join in the presence of their loved ones and their sense of what is sacred to covenant to build a relationship for the rest of their life.
In Colonial America, when covenant was used to talk about membership in congregational churches, it meant that those entering a covenant or joining a congregation were doing so for the foreseeable future. As we are much more mobile today, the foreseeable future may be only a few years. Who knows when a career change or retirement may take us half way across the country? In the fifteenth century, when Puritan joined a congregation, they did so for the rest of their life, and probably the next couple of generations. Covenants don’t have an end date attached the way most contacts do.
The second way that a covenant is different from a contract is that a covenant applies to the whole of a person, whereas a contract involves only a part, especially a skill, possessed by a person. For example one may contract to have a house built. However, in a marriage, two people make a covenant with each other. They commit their whole selves to each other. While the identity of the individual persists, even prevails over the institution, covenants are concerned with an entire person, not parts of a person, or moments of their lives.
The third and perhaps most significant difference between a covenant and a contract is accountability. Contracts exist as a sort of quid pro quo. You do X for me and I’ll do Y for you. But you have to do X, or I won’t do Y. Covenants are very different in that they assume best intentions. Each party of a covenant assumes that the intentions of the other are good, that he or she is doing their best. The breach of the covenant by one party does not automatically nullify the other party’s obligation.
This does not mean that anything goes. While covenants do enjoin us to be flexible, they do not invite disrespect or repeated denial of the covenant. Just as occasionally marriages find a natural end, a time when it is best for both parties to move in different directions, so too covenants can, and sometimes should be ended.
This covenant stuff is serious business. It is a big challenge, but that’ what we are. It’s why you sign up for in becoming a part of this community. We choose to be Unitarian Universalists, and we take the responsibility to decipher with and open and free mind, what it is that we believe. Freedom to join, freedom to believe are at the core of our faith tradition. And that is why we are a liberal faith tradition.

Unitarian Universalism sits solidly in the tradition of liberalism. No I am not about to endanger our non-profit status or even go on a social justice tangent. I’m talking about liberalism as an ideology that is a product of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The word “liberal” itself is derived from the Latin liberalis, its root is liber, or free. The Oxford English Dictionary defines liberal as “free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favor of traditional opinions or established institutions” and “open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform.”
Liberalism comes out of a distinct moment in history, it comes with the modern age. The modern age brought the idea that we each have the capacity to discover and to question the world around us. We can learn through experimentation and make generalizations about what is true. This liberty, this religious liberalism is through and through who we are, from the very beginning of American Unitarian roots.
Liberal religion in America first began to come together in response to the Great Awakening. You may have heard of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It was exactly what it sounds like. It was based on fear and punishment. It used the emotions and fear to lead worshipers to repent and convert. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards is the classic example of the religion of the Great Awakening. It was a period beginning around 1734 when original sin and repentance were the order of the day. Revivalist preachers traveled the countryside offering immediate salvation from eternal damnation if you simply profess your faith in Jesus.
As these revivalist preaches began traveling, spreading a gospel of fear and repentance, the liberal church leaders of New England closed their pulpits to that brand of religion. In the wake of this great wave of emotionalism and fear, American religious liberals began to unite in claiming reason and tolerance as the basis of Christian religion.
Without going into tremendous historical detail, those liberal Christians who supported reason over fear began the movement that we know as Unitarianism today.
When we talk about our liberal faith, we are talking about a commitment to freely deciphering what is true or false. Liberal faith is about not taking for granted what we have been told by an authority. Having Liberal Faith is a commitment to look critically at all the information and experience available, and choosing what we believe, choosing what makes the most sense. When we say Unitarian Universalism is a liberal faith, it’s not about politics. It is about individuals taking responsibility to think and act to make their world a better place.

I started this sermon by saying that Unitarian Universalism is a liberal faith tradition based in covenant between its members. I hope that that resonates more with you now. We know that describing our church to other people is not the easiest thing in the world. I usually feel like a deer in the headlights for a moment when someone asks. But it’s worth checking in every once in a while to prepare ourselves for that conversation about where we come from.

But getting a grasp of where we come from is also about charting a course for our future. Unitarian Universalism is intended to be a dynamic, ever-changing tradition. It’s democratically lead, even our Principles and purposes document is up for review and editing every decade. We are about change and growth, but without knowing where we come from, we will never reach the full potential of what we might one day become.

Sermon - "Sharing the Light"

2011-12-26T09:33:00.001-08:00

For Christians around the world, Jesus means a great many different things. And of course Christmas means a great many different things. For some, it’s a time to celebrate the birth of a savior. For most Unitarian Universalists, it’s a holiday of light in the cold dark winter. And it’s a time to celebrate the birth of a great spiritual teacher named Jesus.

But tonight, I want us as Unitarian Universalists to dive into the Christmas story in a deeper way. I want to dive into what it means for God to be born into a human body, in a cold dark time of year, born to an unsuspecting mother, a traveler in a foreign land without a proper place to stay for the night.

Every year when Christmas roles around and I begin to work on this particular homily I’m reminded of how rich and powerful this story is. The story of the birth itself is amazing and reminds us of the hope that rests in every single child born. But the piece of the story that I want to focus on tonight, is that God chose to be born this way. In the Christian tradition, God’s greatest gift to the world is Jesus Christ. He could have come at any time, to any person, glorious or humble. But he chose a cold dark night, and a young unwed migrant mother.

I’m not asking you to accept the details of the story. I am asking you to sit with me, and wonder what it means for the greatest gift to the world, to be born as human, fragile, vulnerable, in the cold dark night?

The power of this story is in its unlikely nature. One possibility is to point to all those details and be wowed my miracles. Another possibility is to be wowed by the simplicity. An unwed mother, travelers in a foreign land, few resources, sleeping in a stable on a cold night. All of these pieces that point to miracle, also point to the humble, to the earthly, the human.

It reminds me that the greatest gift that we can give is our humanity. The most precious thing we have to offer is the messy, humble, real humanity that rests in each of our hearts.

Just like you, I went to a few different holiday events this year. But one stands out in my mind as something special, something embodying Christmas in a special way. It was the pot-luck held at the Morris’ home. It wasn’t special in the way you might think. It had little to do with the food or decorations. It was special because of the pieces of humanity that were shared that evening. I talked with people about mental illness in the family, I talked with people about the struggle and hope to create a new life as a spouse fades in old age. I talked about the joys of parenting and the difficulty of navigating holidays after a divorce. And I was touched most of all by hearing one of our members say that this community is the only place in his life that he really feels accepted.

It’s no secret that the Morris’ have a lovely home and they throw a great party. There was plenty of food and wine. The Christmas carols were amazing. But something about this party resonated with me in a whole new way. I encountered people offering the gift of their genuine self. It was beautiful and I felt incredibly blessed to receive what was offered there.

These are the Christmas gifts that I’m interested in this year. This is the kind of giving that resonates when I hear the Christmas story. God so loved the world that he became born in flesh and blood of an infant child, to an unwed mother in a foreign land. He so loved the world that he offered the most sacred thing of all, he offered the gift of vulnerability.

You see giving the gift of ourselves is sort of like choosing what dishes to serve your guests on for dinner. Just go with me for a minute on this one. There is a choice to be made when you have gusts for dinner. Do you want to use the everyday cereal bowl… the one that you used this morning perhaps, or do you want to use the good china. It’s a choice that we make, if not with our dishes, then with our hearts. Do we want to pull out the valuable stuff, maybe dust it off, and offer something really special to the people who have gathered near. Or do we want to use the same old every-day stuff, the stuff that isn’t so rare, the stuff that’s much sturdier.

It’s true that we don’t get the most precious pieces of ourselves out all the time for every occasion. If we did that, they would be chipped and worn, and there would be hardly anything left worth enjoying about them. But if we don’t pull that nice china down from the cabinet every once in a while, if we keep our true selves hidden away, sure, they will be protected. They will sit there, safely in the dark. And they will never be enjoyed for the beauty that they hold.

If ever there is a time to pull out the special stuff and offer it to loved ones, it is Christmas. This is the season of giving, but this year I challenge you to give something more than boxes or bags. I challenge you to offer a little piece of your self, a piece of your heart, to the safekeeping of another person in your life. Because the real stuff that makes you human, the doubts and anxieties, the hopes and dreams, the mistakes, the joys, all of that messy stuff that makes us human, is the best gift of all.

This night, we gather to celebrate the story of the birth of a child. But it’s not just any birth. This is the story of how God chose to be born on earth in the form of all that is messy, all that is vulnerable and week and in need of support. This is the story of all that is good and beautiful becoming embodied in humanity. It’s that same beauty and goodness that finds expression in our messy lives. Our questions, our foibles, and joys and fears. They are the best stuff about us, and they are the best gift that we can share with one another if we choose to.

In a moment we will pass the light from candle to candle. As we do, as the room fills with a warm glow, I want you to remember that this light is beautiful, but it is only a symbol for the real gifts that we could share with one another. Unlike the material gifts that are sitting at home under the tree, the gift of our hearts is something that actually grows when we share it. Just like the candle flame that we share. Offering our genuine selves to one another is a gift that we can both give away and keep for ourselves.

The words of a lovely Christmas song sum up this idea. It’s called “Be a Candle of Hope.” The song says “Be a candle of hope, be a candle of light, a beacon of truth in a dark hopeless night. Share the light with a friend and watch the flame grow. The more light we give, the more love we’ll know. When you light another candle, you keep your light but give it away. Yet the flame grows even brighter as the darkness turns into day.”

As we move into the candle lighting and closing hymn, I want to send you with a challenge this holiday. I challenge you to let the best give you give this Christmas season not to be something that comes out of a box or a bag. Let the best thing that you give this Christmas season be a piece of your heart.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Hope in the Darkness" - Advent

2011-12-12T07:59:00.001-08:00

The past week here has been glorious. It’s the perfect California winter weather. I love it, and I try not to talk too much about it to people who don’t live here. Wearing a T-shirt at the beach in mid December simply can’t be beat. I love it, and yet still somehow, I miss the sunshine. Still, in the midst of this winter paradise the days feel short now. The nights are so long. Darkness is a bigger part of our lives.

And somehow it always surprises me. Around Thanksgiving I start to feel a little down. I want to spend more time at home alone. I want to slow down. And every year it takes at least a week to realize. Oh yeah. There’s a reason for this feeling. It has little to do with me, or the people in my life. It has everything to do with the rhythm of nature.

This is a time of darkness in the Northern Hemisphere. It always has been and it always will be. It’s a time of darkness, and a time of hoping for more light. Hoping for something new. Maybe you have a simple wish for our personal lives, maybe a revolutionary vision of how Love will save the world. But it’s a time of hoping.

As you may know we have a monthly theme for our worship services here at UUFLB. It’s no coincidence that the theme for worship in December is hope. For many of us, Christmas and other holidays are a time of hope. But there’s more to it than that. During this dark month of December, we celebrate hope like a light in the night. You see hope always has a sense of longing to it, there’s something to be gained, some improvement needed. There is no hope in a perfect world.

Just last week we were talking about how for many people’s hope came in a sense of a promised land, a far off place that might offer a better life one day. You see hope isn’t wrapping up all your problems in a pretty package with a bow. It’s not the conviction that everything is perfect, or even that it will be perfect. Hope is not satisfaction, it’s longing. Just like a candle doesn’t have the same illuminating effect in the daytime, our sense of hope finds expression in the dark times, the challenges of life.

The Christians knew all of this when the developed the season of Christmas. Particularly when they developed Advent, which we are celebrating today.
Advent isn’t something that we don’t do much of in Unitarian Universalist churches. So I did a little research and I had a very helpful conversation with Rev. Elizabeth Recther at St. Mary’s. They are after Episcopalian and they take their ritual very seriously after all. What she said jives with what I know about Christian history, and really makes sense.

The first Christian holiday was Easter. By the time of Jesus’ death, there were enough followers for the community to already begin building at that moment. They knew when Jesus died. And they knew when the resurrection occurred. So, from the very beginning, Christians celebrated Easter. It was their one big holiday. Of course in Christian tradition, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, and the promise of salvation for human kind. It is the main event.
Not long after they began celebrating Easter, some church leaders realized, well we can’t just celebrate salvation. We have to have some preparation, something leading up to it. So they began celebrating Lent for 40 days. Lent was a time of making atonement for sins. A time for fasting and purification. A time to prepare for the celebration of salvation.

Now Christmas and Advent are a different, but related story. It’s no secret that Christmas grew out of a pagan holiday. Most Christians freely admit to that today, at least the ones who take history seriously. The December 25th for Christmas date is based on the Roman winter solstice celebration. And the Christians came along and said, we have as Son that we worship too. So in the early 4th Century as Christianity was sweeping the Roman Empire, the Western Christian Church first placed Christmas on December 25. The Eastern Church followed shortly after. Over much of the word, December 25th became recognized as Jesus’ birthday. And they all celebrated the joyous occasion. Then they realized, like Easter, you can’t just jump into the celebration, you need some time to warm up to it. But Christmas and Easter are different holidays with different meaning. Christmas isn’t so much about salvation as it is about joy at the birth of Jesus. So the time of preparation for Christmas, Advent, was created to be a season of hope and anticipation. The Christians knew that to fully experience joy, we need to spend some time preparing our hearts with anticipation. So advent is a season of resting with that anticipation, longing, hoping, for a better world.

There are a lot of different symbols for hope of advent. The one we have here today is an advent wreath. The blue candles are lit on the Sundays leading up to Christmas. The pink candle is lit the Sunday most immediately proceeding Christmas to represent Mary. And the white candle in the center is lit on Christmas day and represents Christ.
And there are advent calendars. Now many of them for children have a little piece of candy or charm that they get to open, one section for each day. And there is special liturgy selected for the season. And the colors of the church change to blue.
There is a lot of powerful symbolism and ritual in the Christian church. They use those symbols well to embrace this period of darkness and waiting for the embodiment of hope. And there’s a certain power in waiting. It’s certainly not something that we celebrate much in our culture today. Patience. Maybe we need a 21st century metaphor for the importance of Advent. How about this, preparing for Christmas and the New Year, this season of hope, is like charging your cel phone. You can’t just plug it in, then take it out and go. You have to wait for the power to build up. To be filled. It takes time to charge a phone, and it takes time to prepare our hearts for the turning of the year.

So here we are, waiting in the darkness and hoping. But waiting doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you don’t know what you are waiting for. As Unitarian Universalists, we are not waiting for the birth of Jesus Christ the savior of the world. I have a proposal of what we may be waiting for as a faith community. Rev. Mike Moran in Denver has created a list of things that he thinks compose a core Unitarian Universalist theology. I’ve decided I’ll be preaching on all of them this Summer. But today, in our season of waiting, our season of hope, I want to share with you one of those ideas of UU belief. It is a belief that “Courageous love will transform the world.” Like any good theological statement it is both vague and exact. Courageous love will transform the world.

It’s exact in the certitude of the statement and in the future orientation. Courageous love WILL transform the world. It is a statement of faith. Saying that any one particular thing will happen with certainty is a bold statement. And saying that it will happen to the entire world goes far beyond the normal sort of prediction.

What is also specific in this statement is the nature of the love that will bring about this force. Courageous love. Not simple or sweet love, or easy love. But courageous love. Love that risks being hurt, love that is willing to be a minority opinion, love that may not be easy to explain. Courageous love is the kind of love that has the power to make this revolutionary change.
And like any good theological statement it also has a high degree of ambiguity. He doesn’t tell us what love will change the world. He doesn’t say that love for the environment will help us turn back from a path of environmental destruction. He doesn’t say that love for our human brothers and sisters will lead us to caring more about everyone having enough food, than caring about building up a supply of fighter jets. He doesn’t tell us that love of justice will guide us toward more humane and fair forms of government. Courageous love will transform the world. He doesn’t tell us love of what. It’s my hunch that if love is going to transform the world, it’s going to involve all of these heart strings.
He doesn’t tell us what kind of love and he doesn’t tell us how it will go about transforming the world. This is perhaps the most important piece. You see the beauty of the statement, “courageous love will transform the world,” is that it invites each of us to interpret the statement on our own terms. AND it invites us to be a part of that hope for transformation.
Unitarian Universalism is a practical religion. If there’s any talk of hope for transforming the world, or salvation, then everyone has an opportunity to be a part of that hope, a part of that salvation. We’re not hoping something will be done for us, or something will happen to us. Our hope is an engaged one. Our hope is in being a part of the transformation that saves our world.
In these dark days of winter, there’s a certain amount of anticipation and energy. This week I have been thinking about what it might look like, if instead of anticipating the chaos of holiday commitments, or the gifts we might receive. What if we spent our time in anticipation of how courageous love will transform the world. It seems to me that that’s a season of anticipation truly worth celebrating.

Making religious / theological statements for our entire community is difficult business. I think Mike Moran has done a nice job with the conviction that courageous love will transform the world. It resonates with me and with our UU history.
But I want to get a little more personal. I don’t think belief or hope is something that can be just handed to you. Sometimes the phrase is used, “giving the gift of hope.” But that is really misleading. No one can be made to hope, any more than they can be made to hate. Certainly we can do a lot to influence one way or the other, but hope isn’t an object that you can just give someone. Hope can’t be given to someone who isn’t willing to receive it with an open heart.
So rather than trying to tell you what to hope for in this season of anticipation, I want you to think a little bit about your own lives and what your deepest yearnings are for the world. With Christmas and Solstice and the New Year just around the corner this is the time for setting new intentions.
So I want you to think with me, what is your hope for the world. What do you want to spend the next couple of weeks incubating in your heart? The only requirement, is that it must be something that you can personally be a part of. What hope do you hold in your heart this season?

Call them out. What is your hope? What are you wanting to see in the world?

Let us be bearers of hope for one another, and bearers of hope for a world in need. It’s not an easy task. But it is perhaps our most important task as a religious community. May our collective hope for the world be nurtured until it takes shape, until it is born, until it changes the world.

Amen

Sermon - "Reaching out in Faith"

2011-11-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

Reaching Out in Faith

This morning we are talking about the way our faith leads us to action, or our action leads us to faith. You see it happens in both directions. Sometimes we are filled with the spirit of compassion, hope, and love, and that spirit calls us to reach out and help improve the world around us. For other people, others of us, we find that by reaching out to help others, our faith is renewed. It is in our action that we find religious experience.

This morning’s hymns talk about both of those experiences. Earlier we sang, “One more step, we will take one more step, till there is peace for us and everyone.” Because through acting to help our world, our spirit is renewed.
And later, we will sing “Love will guide us, peace has tried us, hope inside us will lead the way on the road from greed to giving. Love will guide us through the hard night.” And indeed the love that rests in each of our hearts is the seed of hope, as it moves us to reach out and help those in need.
So I encourage you, as we sing these two amazing hymns, to really absorb them, and ask yourself, which one of these resonates with you. Which of these songs is the story of your heart? The music that we sing isn’t only about creating something beautiful. It’s also about coming to know ourselves in a deeper way.

For many of us, faith leads to action. We feel inspired from a multitude of sources, and that inspiration moves us into taking action. So we make our faith manifest in the world.
The best way I can think of to describe this understanding ourselves as a vessel, a bowl. We are an empty vessel that gets filled up with love from God, from the world around us, from natural beauty. We get filled up, like a bowl being filled up with water, until that water has to flow out somewhere. And we pour out our love in the form of action. We are moved to reach out and share some of what we have been given.
The moment I came to understand this in a very real way was doing hospital chaplaincy work. As a part of the ordination process I did a short stint of chaplaincy at a large hospital in Denver. If you ever run across hospital chaplains, they are amazing people and the work that they do is incredible.
For me, hospital chaplaincy was a mind boggling, and heart boggling thing to jump into. But I was doing it with a small group of other students. Together we shared the technical challenges of knowing what to say when, how to enter a room, how to interact with the variety of families. But more than that we shared the difficulty of being present to crisis, joy, death, hope, dysfunction, loss and love, as we visited one room to the next.
We shared these challenges with one another and we held short worship services to share our sense of faith in the process. In one of the worship services another student shared with us her sense of faith, flowing through her. And how that sense of love and purpose nourished her ability to help others. And she gave us each a small bowl that represented the filling up and pouring out of love. I brought that bowl to share with you today.
The object itself is nothing much. The bowl is from Crate & Barrel. It’s probably meant to use while eating your sushi. But the simple symbol has meant a lot to me. It sits with my other chalices, and reminds me of the flow of love in my life. It reminds me that I need to both fill up, and pour out to keep life in balance.

For a lot of people their faith leads them to reach out. For others I know, the relationship between action and faith is just the opposite. Many people find that through reaching out to improve the world, their hearts are filled and their faith renewed. For these people, for many of you I know, doing good is your religion. It’s through reaching out that faith comes into your life.
Something happens to us when we reach out to help others. Something in our heart gets cracked open a little. Part of it is that in helping others, we get to know them, and get to know ourselves a little bit better. It is reminiscent of the Sanskrit word, Namaste. Throughout India the world is simply a greeting and a sign of respect. It is basically the equivalent of “hello.” "Nama" means bow, "as" means I, and "te" means you. Therefore, Namaste literally means "bow me you" or "I bow to you."
But Western oriented yoga practices have extrapolated more from the original word. They describe it as meaning, "the spirit in me respects the spirit in you," or "the divinity in me bows to the divinity in you.” Maybe this isn’t totally what they mean in India when they casually use the word. It may not be the indigenous to India, but I like the concept. The divine in me respects the divine in you. That’s a big part of what happens when we help others. We get to know them in a new way, and get to know ourselves better as well. We get to see the sacred in those around us, and in so doing, we recognize the sacred in ourselves.

For us as Unitarian Universalists, salvation happens in this lifetime. In this life we learn and grow, that’s the reward for reaching out. In this life we reap the benefit of our actions. Reaching out in faith isn’t about earning a spot in heaven or burning off Karma. It’s about a sense of fulfillment and connection here and now, in this life. Part of it is feeling good about our self, but a much bigger part is feeling good about the world. When we reach out to help others we get to know them, and we come to understand that one day in our own time of need, someone will be there to help us. In reaching out to help, our hearts get filled with love.

I am thrilled to share with you today the news that just this week at their meeting, the UUFLB Board approved offering space in our building to serve as an overflow shelter for the homeless during the winter season. As you may know, our local shelter only has room for 45 people to sleep, yet on any given night many more than that are without a place to sleep in our city. In warmer weather the problem isn’t quite as bad. But over the winter, months, sleeping outside, even in Laguna Beach is not really an option. So for two weeks, we will open our downstairs space for a handful of people to stay warm over night. A volunteer from outside the church will stay over night with them. If you would like to volunteer to open the building at night to let people in, then check them out again in the morning, please let me know. We’ll tell you more as details of the arrangement unfold.
Obviously, I’m glad that we are able to keep people warm and dry. For a relatively small sacrifice on our parts, we can make a real difference in keeping people safe. But our effort is also important because it is an opportunity for us to reach out, and in so doing, to build our faith. When we reach out, or in this case, when we welcome in, we go out of our way just a little, we move just a little, making room for growth in our lives.

That to me is the key component of this question of reaching out in faith. It’s about an openness to change. We are changed by the faith that flows through us and into the world, and we are changed when we see the face of God in another human being, if we are willing to open ourselves to the experience.
That’s why that simple little bowl is still a helpful reminder today. Yes, it reminds me of a particular moment in my life. But more importantly, it reminds me of the flow of life. That sometimes we need to be filled up, and sometimes we need to pour out the love we have been given. That little bowl is a reminder about letting the spirit flow through me, rather than trying to grasp it too tightly.

Reaching out in faith is about allowing the spirit to flow a little bit. The Unitarian songwriter Peter Mayer encapsulates it beautifully in his song “God is a River.” The song begins talking about looking for a solid ground, a stone to hold onto in the unpredictable stream of life. Finding a resting place he called his savior, a divine rock. Then the chorus comes: “God is a river, not just a stone. God is a wild raging rapids and a slow meandering flow. God is a deep and narrow passage, a peaceful sandy shore. God is a river swimmer, so let go.”

Having faith is about letting go. Letting go and being moved by the torrents of our heart and mind. Letting go until we find ourselves moved into action. Letting go until we have not choice but to make manifest the love that fills us. If we are open ourselves to change, our faith can lead us to make a tremendous difference in the world.

And if we are open to change, our actions can make a tremendous difference in our faith. That’s why we do Guest at your Table every year. It’s not a huge source of revenue for the UUSC. Yes, some of you have been very generous over the years. And I’m sure this year we will raise a nice amount of money. But we could do that on one Sunday by simply asking you to write a check.
Guest at Your Table is something different. It is the kind of reaching out that is intentionally open to changing your heart in the process. The title says it all, Guest at Your Table. I sincerely encourage you all to leave this box on your table or wherever you and your family eat most of your meals for the next month. When you enjoy a meal, simply notice the box, and consider having a guest there with you, a guest who needs a little help.
All too often we think of those in need of help as sad, depressing, beggars. People who are different from us. Those commercials with Sally Strothers come to mind. There are newer versions on today. You know the commercials I’m talking about, with a totally emaciated child and flies swarming, while a well-fed American tells the viewers about the desprate need of these desperate people.
As I see it, Guest at Your Table aims to be the total antithesis of that sort of project. Rather than seeing those in need as desperate and different, Guest at Your Table invites us to understand that everyone has a story. Often it’s a story not too terribly different to our own. So we take this opportunity to reach out and give a little support, while at the same time we learn about the lives of people around the world that we are supporting. So that the divinity in us can honor the divinity in them. So that we can reach out and grow in faith.

Unitarian Universalism is an expansive faith. It calls us to go beyond our walls and to help those in need. But more than that, it calls us to go beyond ourselves, and open our hearts to the possibility of new growth. Talking about which comes first, faith or action, is a little bit like talking about the chicken or the egg. It’s a matter of perspective. What is certain however, is that neither of these things exists without the other. These two pieces of our religious life, faith and action are inseparable. Faith without action is a self-congratulatory emotional exercise. And social action without a foundation in principles of love and dignity is certain to fizzle and die.

So let us follow the invitation of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Let us open ourselves to the possibilities. So that in our acting we may be filled, and in our faith we may be moved to action.

-Amen-

Sermon - "The Serenity Prayer"

2011-11-14T12:58:00.000-08:00

Serenity Prayer
For the first time in a VERY long time, I went to a high-school football game last a couple of weeks ago. I live just a couple of blocks away from Laguna Beach high school, so when I heard some of my friends were going to the game I decided to join the. Unfortunately the Laguna Beach Breakers got hammered by the Costa Mesa… what ever they are.

At half time we went and got something to eat. And we noticed the level of energy and anxiety in the middle schoolers and highschoolers around us. There was some low level fighting, there was making out, there was some obvious posturing. It was like social life on steroids. And it made us think back about those days. How exciting it was, and how important every moment of every day was. I don’t mean in a Buddhist sense of living in the moment. I mean in the terrible anxious sense of, “if I don’t do well on this paper it could drop my GPA and I’ll never get into college.” Or “If I don’t get on the team I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.” Or “If I don’t have a date to the dance, a place to eat my lunch, or an exciting plan of the weekend, my life is ruined.” Oh, and “If my totally misinformed and uncool parents don’t get with the program, I’m going to go insane.”

Everything mattered so much. For me, and for a lot of people I think, those years were hard, because so much pressure was placed on every little detail of life. That Friday night at the football game we chuckled a little bit at the youth that we saw around us, and the lack of perspective that we had back then. But the more I reflected on this sermon, the more I realized how easy it is to lose perspective at any stage of life. It’s easy for any of us, in the moment, to be flung back to being an anxious highschooler.

A sense of perspective is a huge gift. It’s something that we can cultivate, and it’s one of the cornerstones of religious life. To me, that’s what the well-known serenity prayer is all about, a sense of perspective. That’s why it is so powerful and speaks to just about anyone who hears it. Who couldn’t use a little help letting go of the little things, or courage to face up to the challenges of life. And most importantly, we all can use some help from time to time in remembering what is worth worrying about and what isn’t.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,  courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Some of us may stumble at the first line of this prayer. Some of us may stumble at the word prayer. I understand that. But exploring a little bit of how this prayer is most often used today may help us as Unitarian Universalists get a better grasp of it. This prayer is best known today for its role in the community of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 step groups.

The beauty of Alcoholics Anonymous is that it revolves around people telling their own story, and sharing with one another where they have found hope and meaning in their own lives. It’s only fair to say that a good portion of that comes in the form of religion, and faith in God. And, so some AA meetings take on a more religious / gody tone than others.

But within AA and the twelve steps, there is no test of creed. There is only a commitment to be a part of the group and try to make your life better. Does that sounds familiar to anyone? It should. Because that’s the way I explain Unitarian Universalism to anyone who asks. We have no set doctrine, no specific thing that we all believe in, but we agree to be on a journey together as we improve our lives.

You don’t have to believe any particular thing there, or here. But in AA they talk a lot about believe in a higher power. The second step of AA is “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Of course for many people that power is God. But for lots and lots of others, that power is something different. It is something like the power of human community, the power of the fecundity of nature, the power of love. Any number of different things are identified to help those in recovery lean on some source outside of themselves.

And just in the way a power greater than themselves can help a person in recovery feel supported and gain perspective beyond the immediate circumstances, any of us can replace the word God in this prayer with whatever we hold in high esteem. Weather that is love, community, nature, God or something completely different, calling upon our highest ideals is a great place to start in our search for serenity and perspective.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

That alone is a tremendous prayer and the spiritual discipline to fill a lifetime. Accepting the things we cannot change is so difficult, and so important. Much of our lives are shaped by things that happen to us. We come into the world from the very beginning shaped by circumstance beyond our control. The family we are born into, the culture, the economic resources, the country, all of these things shape us before we take our first breath.
But it doesn’t end there. Life is filled with things that just happen to us, things beyond our control. Sometimes what we want to change most, are other people in our lives, whether they are friend or foe. One of the hardest things to accept in life has to be the inability to change other people, especially the people that we love. Certainly we can provide encouragement and resources, but it is virtually impossible to force another person to change unless he or she is willing to change themselves. Anyone who has loved someone through addiction knows that struggle.
And anyone who has moved through recovery knows the struggle of not being able to change the past. Every one of us has regrets, a bad decision made here and there. We can do our best to mend a relationship that has been damaged, but the past is the past, there’s no erase in life. There is nothing we can do to change it. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.
And then there is the nagging desire to change ourselves. There are a great many things that we can change about ourselves, but there are many more that we are stuck with. We are imperfect beings, by nature. We are not going to be perfect parents, perfect spouses, perfect homemakers, perfect professionals. And we also aren’t going to have perfect bodies or perfect health. Try as we might, some things are beyond our control.
We spent the month of October focused on death here at UUFLB. That is not primarily because death raises religious questions. We spent a month on the topic because it’s a question that we avoid dealing with in the rest of our lives. We are magnificent creatures, you and I, but we are given limit resources to work with. The sooner we accept the things we cannot change about ourselves, the sooner we can move on to focus on the things we can change.

Grant us the courage to change the things we can.

Faith engenders courage. It inspires us to move beyond ourselves and our immediate concern, to bring about a greater good in the world. People often mention the litany of terrible things that have been done in the name of religion. And it is true. Countless wars have been fought over religion. And religion has been used to justify injustice and oppression in terrifying ways. I’m not going to deny that.
But the religious impulse has also motivated some of the most beautiful moments of humanity as well. Those who rallied to confront injustice did so empowered by their faith. And religious experience has been the inspiration for a vast amount of art, music, philosophy, and even scientific discovery. Faith has a tremendous potential to bring courage into our lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “All great ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of performance, when great national movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest.”

Earnest. That’s a helpful way of describing the kind of courage that faith engenders, or at least the kind that I’m advocating for. It’s about earnestness. It’s about embracing your convictions and living them out in the world.

God give us courage to change the things we can. Give us courage to stand up and speak truth to power. Give us courage to be a beacon for justice. But even more, give us courage to engage small changes, small moments that come every day that we have the power to control. Courage isn’t just about doing the big stuff, it’s also about choosing to do the little stuff right. Whether that means offering a smile to someone who needs it, continuing an uncomfortable conversation to a real conclusion, or making one more little change to make our lifestyle more earth friendly.
People who know this prayer know that change is a hard thing to do. As creatures of habit, we rarely choose change, even when we know it will bring about an improvement in our lives. No one likes change. I recently read the only person who really likes change is a wet baby. So while we hope our faith leads to courage to change the world, we also hope it leads to courage make the little changes that improve our life, baby step by baby step.

Of course the crux of this prayer is in gaining the wisdom to know the difference. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Notice the request is for wisdom, not intelligence, or information. What we long for isn’t so much a laundry list of what is worthy of our time and what isn’t. Because you and I both know that we would ignore that list.
I hesitated to tell the story of attending a high school football game and the anxiety of youth that we saw there, because I don’t want to be condescending to youth. I don’t want to say, “You know you may not even remember prom. There are lots of colleges you can attend. Everyone else has acne too. Maybe that wasn’t the one and only true love of your life.” We don’t say those things because they are insensitive to the real pain of the moment. And we also don’t say them because we know they won’t be heard.
It is impossible to absorb the information that this thing that you are so upset about is really no that big of a deal. You have no power to change this thing that you are so hung up on, and meanwhile the rest of your life is flying by. It’s not something that information can impart or something that intelligence alone can process. Try telling that to a fifteen year old who has just ended a relationship that in the grand scheme of things, its not that big of a deal. It’s a message that doesn’t sink when it comes from another person.
The wisdom to know the difference is something that we cultivate for ourselves, and it’s something that comes through a relationship with a higher purpose. It’s a little odd to dedicate an entire worship service to one short little prayer. But this prayer is one that has application for each and every person’s life. And more importantly, as we talk more about faith this month, this prayer is a beautiful description of what faith has to offer us. Having a relationship with something greater than ourselves, be it God, or our highest ideals gives some context to our lives. It helps clarify what really matters.
The wisdom to know the difference isn’t something ANYONE can tell you. But it is something that each one of us can cultivate for ourselves, when we check in with that higher purpose, that reality beyond ourselves. That’s what having faith is all about.

Amen.

Sermon - "Wrestling with God"

2011-11-07T11:23:00.001-08:00

For the month of November, we are focussing on the theme of faith in our worship services and children’s Religious Education here at UUFLB. And we are going to start that discussion of faith in a very Unitarian Universalist place, by talking about doubt.

“Wresting with God” is a peculiar name for a sermon in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. The name comes from the story of Jacob wresting with an angel. It’s a story of grappling with the holy, wrestling with the most important pieces of our lives. This story is pretty far removed from our lives, but it still points to a very important idea.
To give some background, Jacob was the son of Isaac and Rebekah, the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. So he’s way up there in the Biblical family tree, a pretty important figure. The whole story of Jacob begins in one of those really, really strange Bible moments. Jacob, God’s chosen leader essentially cheated his older brother out of his birthright of inheritance. Jacob dressed up as his older and much dumber brother to trick his own father on his death bed. He pretended to be the older brother Essau, so that their father would bless him and make him the official heir. And Jacob pulled off the stunt so he could be the leader God wanted him to be. It’s strange stuff.

Eventually the cheating caught up with Jacob. In adulthood his brother found him and came after him with an army of 400 men. So Jacob ran. He sent his family and his flocks of sheep across the river at a river crossing one night. Then he came back across, all alone to get his possessions. While he was there, a mysterious being appeared. Some say it was a man, some say and angel. The two of them wrestled until daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he touched the socket of his hip so that it hip was wrenched terribly. Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak.  But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, "What is your name?" "
Jacob," he answered.”
 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."

This story is often used as the moment of a personal struggle with faith. It’s quite literally, if one reads the story that way, a moment of wrestling with divinity. It’s a hard fight. Jacob walks with a limp for the rest of his life from where the angel injured his hip. But Jacob struggled with divinity and he refused to let go of that struggle until he got a blessing out of it.
Jacob wasn’t the only person to wrestle with God in the Bible. I might even say most of the significant figures in the Bible have their major moments of doubt. The first response of every single one of the prophets is “no.” It’s a formulaic story of the prophetic call in the old testament. Every single one of them says no at first at least once, and often twice. It took getting swallowed by a whale for Jonah to accept his mission in life. The first time God came knocking on his door he took off and sailed away to escape what his life was shaping up to be.

And Sarah, the wife of Abraham laughs at God when she is told she will have a child. Even after the whole run in with the burning bush, Moses said over and over again, “No. No not me. You must be mistaken, I can’t lead people.” Until God finally said, “Okay you can use your brother to help you. He’s a better public speaker anyway.” Then there is the quintessential doubter, Thomas the disciple. He wants to see and touch the wounds of Jesus after the resurrection, to prove that he is who he claims to be. Over and over again, in the Bible the example of a faithful life is the one that contains a serious level of doubt.

The Bible is full of incredible stories of burning bushes, whale attacks, wrestling angels. They are pretty fantastic stories that don’t make sense in our lives. But we have our own moments of wrestling. Seismic shifts in our lives shake us from the foundation up. It may be the death of a loved one. A spiritual awakening, gradual maturation, the birth of a child, or a near death experience. I’m sure you have had one or two of these in your time. They change the logistics of your life, but they also change what we believe in.

My own faith has been shaken several different times in these sorts of moments. Growing up in Oklahoma, a very Christian notion of God shaped my religious identity. It wasn’t totally simplistic, but I hadn’t seen enough of the world to mold my faith into something that was more sustainable.
So just a couple of months into my time in the peace Corps, that faith slid away. I was a Unitarian Universalist so the idea of not believing in God wasn’t terrifying. But it just change in my mind. In the Peace Corps I came to see that the God I had believed in before simply didn’t make sense in this world of inequality and poverty. The God that I knew didn’t fit the equation any longer.
But two years later, I landed in seminary. It was the exact opposite experience. There, God became completely expansive as we learned different possibilities through theologians’ ideas. God was many, many different things, each one of them exciting. I tried on lots of these different ideas of God. One after the other, across continents and centuries, these different ideas of the divine spoke to different pieces of me.
In the end, I don’t think any of them completely fit. Where I landed mostly was a fascination with Buddhist teachings. The Buddha explained that life is very difficult, but if we can let go of our clinging to the things that don’t matter, we can let go of that suffering as well. It’s a philosophy and lifestyle choice, designed to bring peace and wellbeing in this life. And Buddhism brought some peace, without God.
But even more recently, this year as a matter of fact, my relationship with God has been turned on its head once again. It’s a story that I’m still coming to terms with, still trying to understand. But I came to learn that much of my life I had been prayed for, without my even knowing it. Prayed for by someone who cared deeply about me and my journey. And the revelation of this prayer has rekindled a deep faith in a God that has watched over me, walked with me, for years. It has led me back to into calling that mysterious sacred peace of my life God.
My beliefs have shifted over the years in infinite mutations. Those are my major shifts. I’m sure you have plenty of your own shifts in belief that are interwoven with shifts in your lives. It’s tough to get very far in adulthood without some shifting in belief.

So far I have been talking about wrestling with whether or not something called God exists. And wrestling with different ideas of God. But that’s not nearly a wide enough scope. As Unitarian Universalists we have a great many different beliefs. And the sort of wrestling we do involves all of those beliefs. Both the diversity of beliefs within our community, and the diversity of beliefs within our selves are too expansive for plain old wrestling with God. You see the wrestling comes when we try to put our beliefs together to make some sense of the world around us.
More than a question about God, what I’m talking about wrestling with our world view, how we understand the world around us, how we make sense of it, and where we find hope in the midst of that jumble. That’s why theology is a huge academic discipline. It’s like putting together a giant puzzle. It’s not just a question of whether or not God exists to you, but a much, much more complicated question of how do all of those pieces of your belief fit together.

Lets run a little test. I want to ask you some questions, and you don’t need to respond or raise your hand. Just think of the answer for yourself. Do you think there is something called God? Are people basically good, or bad? Do we have more free will or do other factors dictate our actions? Is there life after death? Do we have a soul that is separate from the matter and energy of our body? Can prayer change the world outside of ourselves? Finally, Do the answers to these questions fit together? It’s hard enough to come up with answers to these individual questions. But it’s all the harder to make the pieces fit together.

A lot of this sermon is inspired the book by Rev. Chris Schreiner is going to present a workshop on this Tuesday night. The workshop is about how atheists and theists can engage in meaningful dialog. In talking about the way our beliefs fit together, Chris uses the metaphor of the bricks of a house. Our beliefs are built one upon another, sort of like the bricks or stones of a house. Over they years they build up, layer upon layer. But sometimes in our lives, something happens that changes one of those beliefs. And if we take out one of those beliefs in the wall of our house, you can’t just stick another one in its place with a little glue. It takes some masonry skills, to build up and whittle away at the bricks that surround the hole. When one of our beliefs is changed, the beliefs surrounding it change, and making things fit back together again can be exhausting work.

This is a big piece of what we do as a church. On Sundays I try to explore a variety of different viewpoints. In fact I frequently contradict myself between different sermons on a similar topic. If you listen closely you’ll notice it. That’s because I do my best to offer different perspectives. The goal is to help our masonry, to help you whittle away or build up existing beliefs to make room for the changes as we learn and grow.
And it’s what happens when I talk with people in pastoral care. Yes part of the discussion is social, but the much bigger part, comes in questions that friends aren’t likely to ask. “What does this all mean for you?” “Where do you find hope in this situation?” These are the questions I ask and talk through with people when they are ready, when their lives change and a brick is disturbed. “What does this all mean to you.” When we are at our best as a religious community, we walk with one another, as we rebuild our houses. We stay with one another and offer support in the times of wrestling with God.
The reason why that story about Jacob is so amazing and used frequently isn’t because it is a good wrestling match, or because Jacob’s name gets changed to Israel. The real nugget of the story is when Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” If nothing else that’s what I want you to take home from today’s worship service. When wrestling with God, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” I will not let go of this struggle until I get something out of it. Because the only way out is through. The only way out of those transformational moments is to actually go through them, and grab a hold of whatever blessing there is to be found.
As Unitarian Universalists we do doubt well. We can deconstruct and analyze others and ourselves with great speed and accuracy. And it’s a skill we have earned. Most of us have come from other religious traditions. Most of us have made the conscious decision to step away from a religious community of our family and upbringing, to saying no, that doesn’t sound right. No I won’t say those words that I don’t believe in. Most of us coming here having already consciously chosen to doubt the beliefs that were handed to us.

And you have come to the right place. As an institution we are not keen on authority. We pride ourselves on the democratic process, ensuring that no one person is given authority over others without their consent. Unitarian Universalism is a tradition of doubters. We can knock those bricks out one after another. But eventually we have to come through to the other side, to believe something.

Doubt is good thing. Asking hard questions is good and it’s something we do very well. As UUs however, we are not always great at following through with the struggle to it’s conclusion. We ask questions long enough for the status quo to be unsettled, for our beliefs to be challenged. But our mission is deeper than that. Our role as a religious community is to hold onto those questions, to continue to wrestle, until we come upon an answer, a meaning, a blessing on the other side.
-Amen-

Sermon - "A Great Cloud of Witnesses"

2011-10-31T11:29:00.001-07:00

Great Cloud of Witnesses
For the past year, Unitarian Universalist ministers have been wrestling with the question “Whose are we?” It sounds simple at first, but it actually leads to some pretty deep theological discussion. Whose are we? To whom are we ultimately accountable? One reasonable answer seems to be, that we are accountable to our ancestors. We are accountable to those people who have shaped the world we live in and who have made our lives possible.

Obviously I don’t mean that we are responsible for living our lives exactly how they would have lived theirs. You know that whole saying about history and being DOOMED to repeat it. We’re not dooming ourselves to repeat the lives of those who have gone before. But I do think we are called to live with a sense of gratitude for the way that has been paved for us, and for the way these people helped to mold us when they were in our lives. Each one of us, young and old, has been shaped by a group of people who are no longer alive. They were our parents, and grand-parents, our partners, our friends, in some cases maybe even children. They have all shaped our lives, a great cloud of witnesses who lived and died have made us who we each are today. And we honor them all today.

This expression, “the great cloud of witnesses” comes straight out of the Bible. Hebrews 12 says “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us,”

This is all about early Christians having the courage to pursue their faith in the face of persecution. The cloud of witnesses here are the saints who had been martyred for their Christian faith. They were tortured to death. And the other Christians were to look to them to find courage in appreciating the sacrifices that had been made for them, and for their religious community.

Getting tortured to death is heavy stuff. And frankly I find it gruesome more than inspiring. It seems like sainthood may not be all that helpful a source of inspiration in the twenty first century. What is inspiring though, is being grateful for the lives of real people. Real complicated lives, just like our own, lives that were filled with challenges and learning and tough choices are what we celebrate today. Those are the ones we are accountable to. Along with all the heroes of history, the people we know and remember, the ones we knew and loved, form a great cloud of witnesses that inspire our own lives.

I first became familiar with these words from Rev. John Wolf, the minister I grew up with. I had no idea these words came from the bible, but I knew that he had, and we should have, a sense of respect for those people who have died that inspire our lives. Living with a sense of gratitude is one of the most important, and simplest lessons we learn in church. And it’s something we all can practice, from the youngest here today, to the oldest: gratitude for the lives we live and the world we enjoy.

I don’t know what Rev. John’s religious background was. He famously refused to tell the church when he interviewed at the church if he was a theist or an atheist. He told them, “If you are a theistic congregation, then I am and atheist, and if you are an atheist congregation, then I am a theist.” We didn’t know exactly what he thought about God, we knew what he meant about the Great Cloud of Witnesses. You don’t have to believe that Peter is at the pearly gates with a long scroll of names to celebrate the lives of people who have formed the world we live in. It’s a perfectly vague reference to a reality that we all can relate to.

Most of all, I love this phrase because it speaks of the multitude of people who make up the community of the dead. It speaks of not just one or two people that we may have known and loved. It speaks of a vast and thick body of numerous people to whom we owe respect. Today we invoke their names and their memories, all of them, a multitude of loved ones, a great cloud that blesses us.

Some might call Halloween the season for conjuring up ghosts. I suppose it is. But Halloween is quickly followed by holidays that for many of us bring us much, much closer to our departed loved ones. Memories of people we have loved and lost flood Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, sometimes in wonderful ways, sometimes in painful ways. Of course time makes a huge difference in the way we feel about those memories.

For me, memories of grandparents are most pronounced when we sit down for a holiday dinner. To begin with, we still sit at the dining table that my grandmother had made for their home, probably 65 years ago. And my uncle, the rambunxious youngest child of the family tells about grandma chasing him around that very table trying to catch up to spank him. Then, without fail, we recount the recount the story about how one Christmas dinner my grandfather caught the napkin of the dinner rolls on fire as he passed the basket over a candle. Someone quickly grabbed them and threw them outside in the snow. That was one of the few White Chirstmasses in Oklahoma. Even the recipes that we make during the holidays remind us of who would have made them decades ago. Some of you have eaten the Banana Nut Bread that was my great grandmother’s recipe. She was the famed baker of the family.

For me the holidays are packed with memories of people who are no longer in my life. And I know the same is true for many of you. It’s only natural that we remember those people who were pieces of us.

Remembering the dead isn’t morbid or ghoulish or anything negative at all. It’s something that people have always done in one way or another. Every religious tradition has some sort of recognition of the dead. Whether it’s through funerals or specific holidays. Some of our kids may have seen the Disney movie Mulan, about a Chinese girl who wants to be a warrior. Part of the tension in her family and in the village is about what the ancestors would have wanted. In that movie, they were probably Taoists. That’s a religion where paying respects to ancestors is one of the most important things you can do.

We celebrate our ancestors and deceased loved ones in a huge variety of ways. Today we borrow from the Latin American tradition of Dia Des Los Muertos. It’s probably not a custom that most of us do outside of church. I don’t think many of us have altars set up in our home. We visit graves sites, or maybe if you have scattered ashes, we remember fondly when we look out at the Ocean. Some people talk to their loved ones in private moments, especially immediately after their death. In my family, remembering folks is mostly about funny stories. We remember our loved ones and celebrate the great cloud of witnesses in a huge variety of ways.

And for us as Unitarian Universalists, one of the most important ways has to be living meaningful lives that reflect gratitude for our loved ones. We show our love and respect through actions that give life to the aspirations of the great cloud of witnesses. As we celebrate Halloween, All Saints Day, and Dia Des Los Muertos let us celebrate the lives of those we have lost, by living more fully ourselves, by living lives that honor the countless gifts we have each been given.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Leaving a Legacy"

2011-10-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

As we all know by now, we are in the middle of the 2012 pledge campaign. Part of that effort is legacy giving. That’s planning to give a portion of your estate to the Fellowship after death. It has been a vital piece of our income, and we hope it will continue in the future. If you want to learn more about the possibilities, please talk with Barbara and Tom. In conjunction with the UUA, they can support a pretty wide variety of types of planned giving.

But leaving a legacy isn’t just about leaving money. In fact it’s not primarily about giving money. I think of it sort of like parenting, and more generally caring for the people that you love. One big piece of that role is providing material resources, a home and food. The basic necessities make life possible, and a range of other material resources can make life easier or open wider opportunities. In the end, those things are about providing financially. But we also offer other gifts in caring for children or loved ones. Arguably, we offer much more important gifts of guidance, love, support, patience, discipline. We offer our outlook on the world, our sense of right and wrong. Implicitly we offer our ideas about God and religion.

So leaving legacy is sort of like caring for our loved ones. There are a few different ways that we provide support. Some support is financial, and some is emotional. The financial piece you can talk about with your accountant or with Tom, our VP for fiannce. The more emotional piece is what I want to talk about today.

Whether we understand it as a financial gift, as a spiritual presence, or as an ethical / emotional legacy, there will be a continued presence after each of our deaths. We talk about it in many different terms, but something continues on.

While I have been with many other grieving families, I have been fortunate to have not lost many people close to me. My primary personal experience of death has been that of my grandparents, most recently the death of my grandmother. Time finally snuck up on this wonderful firecracker of a southern belle. After some sever medical complications she struggled and slowly declined over a couple of years.

I went to visit my grandmother in the nursing home where she was staying. We had a nice visit. Her attention span varied from day to day, but I remember her being clear this particular day. We had lunch with her friends and chatted a bit. Eventually it was time for me to go. I was leaving to go back to Colorado and then out of the country for several weeks. I knew very well that this might be our last time to spend together. “I’ll see you soon.” I said, kissed her cheek, and walked out the door.

Before reaching the end of the hallway a sinking feeling settled into my gut. Why had I allowed myself such a causal parting? Why didn’t I have the courage to end our conversation with goodbye? “I’ll see you soon,” I said. It felt like a complete cop out, a total denial in the face of death. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to let her go.

I’m not sure when this came together and made sense to me. It probably came to me the driving the car or brushing my teeth one morning. I have a sort of contrived fantasy of an epiphany as I stepped out of the nursing home and into the sunlight but I know that isn’t the case. Regardless of the time or place, I finally came to see that my last words to my grandmother were not an empty lie. I knew that I would indeed see her again soon. That I would see her in the smile of my mother, in the wonderfully irreverent family gathering at Thanksgiving, and most of all in myself.

No, I don’t have dreams about conversing with my grandmother in white robes sitting on fluffy clouds. For many people images of heaven or other notions of an afterlife provide comfort and meaning in the face of loss. They are each valid and real responses. But I find comfort knowing that she lives in me. She lives on in the fascinating and wonderful world that she helped create.

And that was her final gift to me. She gave me a clearer understanding of my place in the world and my relationship with God. Thousands of pages of theology texts and countless hours of class time and discussion could not give me the reassurance that my grandmother finally imparted. I will see you soon. I will see you forever.

My grandmother didn’t have any money to leave behind. But the legacy that she left me was invaluable, both in her life, as she helped raise and mold me, and in her death, she lives on as a symbol of unconditional love. That’s the sort of legacy that I want us to think about today. Both the legacies that we have been blessed to inherit, and the legacies that we will leave when we are gone.

If you are a reader of our newsletter, the Sealight, you may remember that I wrote about an effort that I am calling The Legacy Project. What I hope to do is to interview some of our members, to collect their stories and a bit about what their life has been about. Now this isn’t the sort of who, what, where, when interview that you may be familiar with. Yes, I’m looking for stories, but only because those stories, the ones that stick out in memory, are an example. They are an example of what is important in your life. I’ll also be asking participants about what has been most important to them over the years, and what they hope for the future of our world. Then after the interview, everything will be put down in writing and I’ll check back to make sure it is accurate and it is the message you want to share. It will be printed and bound so you can share it with whomever you want. The goal is to encapsulate to the extent possible, the yearnings and learnings of a person’s life. We want to capture those stories and thoughts for two different reasons.

First of all, it is an incredible legacy gift. This legacy isn’t about money or material things. This legacy is about documenting the hard-earned lessons, the years of joy and heartache, to pass on to another generation. It’s a gift of heart and mind, to feed the future.

The second, and no less important goal of the legacy project is that it gives the interviewee an opportunity to do some discernment, and finally get something down on paper. How many of us have half written journals at home, or the book we never wrote, or the letters to loved ones that have never been written? I’m betting lots. The idea of recording these stories and thoughts on paper is to offer some assurance that what is in your heart has been recorded. And what you most want to share with your loved ones will be there even when you are gone. It’s a chance to be sure that your memory will live on the way you want it to.

Believe me, as someone what has sat with plenty of families already in my short time of ministry, recording your thoughts on paper is one of the most meaningful gifts anyone can give to their family. It can happen with something like I am trying to do with the Legacy Project, or it can happen in a much more specific way, in something like a living will. But, I have seen way to many families wringing their hands with uncertainty after a loved one dies. Putting your legacy in writing guarantees the message you want, will get across to the people you care about. It’s that simple.

Putting down on paper the legacy that you want to leave is important, but thinking about death and your legacy isn’t something only to be done in Autumn years. Awareness of our own mortality certainly grows with time, but it comes to light throughout our lives. Just last week I heard from a young mother who was shaken to the core by the death of a peer, another mother with young children. As the reality of the fragility of life set in, she was deeply concerned for her own young children. “What if something happened to me,” she wondered? “What would that mean for my kids?” The reality of our own mortality sinks in at different times and in different ways. It can be deeply unsettling. It can strike fear into the core of our hearts when we know there is so much that remains undone. So many people to be loved more, so many goals to be achieved, so many fascinating things to be learned. Recognizing our mortality can be a very scary thing.

But it can also be an amazing piece of motivation. Not too long ago our world changed when one of the century’s most influential innovators died. I count myself among the many, many people who knew little about Steve Jobs before he died. But as many have learned, his creativity and relentless challenge to improve, were responsible for much of electronics as we know them today. He was an amazing man. And according to Steve Jobs himself, part of his unrelenting nature came from an early grappling with his own mortality.

At the 2005 commencement speech and Stanford University, Steve Jobs said, “When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

I love that immediate grasp of perspective. If this were the last day of your life, is this what you want to be doing? The answer may be no, for a day or two. We have all been there. But if the answer is no for too many days in a row, it is time to change something. Thinking about the legacy that we will leave in the world isn’t just about writing a will when we are 80 years old. Thinking about the mark that we hope to leave on the world is a question for everyone, every day of our lives. Because frankly, there’s no telling which one will be our last.

For Steve Jobs, the last day of his life came long before anyone thought was fair. It’s jarring when people die young. It’s really jarring, because it reminds us of our own mortality. But the funny thing about death is that it’s the one thing that is certain. You know the old adage, the only thing that’s for sure is death and taxes.

In the average life there are so many twists and turns, so many unexpected little, and not so little shifts that we never expect. It would be impossible to plan for them all… but we try. We keep a tidy calendar and have disaster kits. We plan for college, and careers and retirement. We do our best to anticipate and plan for what comes next. Yet the one thing that is certain to happen TO ALL OF US, is something we rarely talk about.

Obviously, I don’t mean this sermon to be a big dooms day message. “The End Is Near” or anything like that. I’m not saying we are all doomed so we might as well accept our mortality and let go. NO. Quite the opposite. This is about taking an honest look at our lives, taking account, to see if they add up the way we hope. Because if they don’t, if there’s something that needs to change, then today is the day to do it.

-Amen.

Sermon - "Shiva's Gift"

2011-10-03T15:01:00.001-07:00

Shiva’s Gift
Maybe for the first time since I moved to Sothern California five years ago, I feel like we are having an actual autumn last week. No doubt the Santa Anna winds will come and dry roast us in about a month, but for now, I’m reminded of jumping in piles of leaves, hot cocoa, and the always’ changing seasons of our lives.

Throughout the month of October, we will be talking about death in different ways here at church. Today we are talking about death, not in the personal sense so much as the broader, abstract sense. Today we are talking about destructive forces in the universe, whether it is in nature, in us as individuals, or in the cosmic balance of Hindu deities, death plays too big of a role to ignore.

And if we take a couple of steps back from it, we begin to see death as a necessary and amazing piece of the great cycle of life. In the cycle of the seasons the balance of life and death and renewal aren’t so disturbing. The chilling time of Autumn comes around each year. Many of the plants we love die, the leaves on some of our trees shrivel and fall. It’s a season consumed with death, followed by a cold and dark time. But the cold and darkness give way to new life in the Spring, year after year. It’s just the way it goes and we accept that.

But it’s not just in the passing of seasons where we see the cycle of destruction and renewal. Death is a big part of just about every piece of nature that we celebrate. Even the piece of nature that is responsible for our existence, evolution. Evolution is really built on a series of countless destructions, death upon death in order to bring about new potentials for life. It’s grim, but it’s true. An innumerable number of deaths occurred to make way for every single adaptation that made evolution possible.

That reality was really hammered home for me when I saw the film “Creation” that came out a couple of years ago. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it stuck with me, so it must have had something going for it. It was about the life of Charles Darwin. A huge part of the film was Darwin’s personal challenges and illness. And interspersed with this psychological drama were dream sequences. They were rather grotesque dreams of natural selection in process. They were scenes of predators devouring prey, and the death and decay of animals, and the ants and maggots that fed off of the remains. Lets just say, it’s not a movie to watch after dinner.

Initially these images were off-putting. But they were also deeply effective. Sitting there celebrating the most significant discovery in the history of biology, celebrating the miracle of evolution, is the grim depiction of what evolution really required. Death up death until one or two organisms escaped their harsh fate. For four billion years, species developed minute ways of improving themselves. Natural selection, evolution, the interdependent web of life as we celebrate it, is sustained in equal parts by and interdependent web of death.

There are other more tangible ways that Mother Nature deals in death and destruction. Just this past week a colleague who works on the issue of climate change gave me a new perspective on the storms that have begun to ravage our planet.

We were talking about how reluctant humans are to change their lifestyles and the way we impact the environment. The changing weather patterns, the melting of polar ice, and rise of sea levels, these dangers are no longer scientific supposition. They are reality.

So this colleague was talking and he said something that gave me pause. He said that Mother Nature will do whatever she needs to, until we get the message. Mother Nature, source of life, the interconnected web, will thrash the globe with storms, drowning some areas and scorching others. Mother Nature will send destruction, as much as she needs to, until we get the message. She will fight us back, and our odds of winning are not very good.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think these storms and floods are God’s message to this group of people or that group of people for their moral shortcomings. It’s not that kind of message. I don’t believe that God reaches out to smite entire communities Old Testament style.

But I do believe that the earth is crying out, and beginning to literally fight back with incredible force and destruction. Call it mother nature, call it the planet earth, call it the biosphere, it is beginning to fight back with a level of force and destruction that may be the only thing that will shake us out of our ways, and preserve life in the long run. Mother Nature’s slap in the face may be our saving grace.

Talking about death and destruction isn’t something that we do often in church, or in America for that matter. But Hinduism, with its diversity of deities and ideas, has a little gem to offer in this discussion. In fact they have a whole God dedicated to what we are talking about today.

Shiva. Shiva is a major deity, definitely in the top five. What we often see as evil: death, decay, hatred, destruction, these are all a part of the universe and part of our human experience. And rather than rejecting these hard realities and labeling them as evil, many Hindus celebrate them in one of their most significant gods.

In images like on your Order of Service, he is represented as a handsome young man immersed in deep meditation or dancing upon Apasmara, the demon of ignorance in his manifestation of Nataraja, the Lord of the dance, goodness, humility, and every good quality a human should have. It is said that He looks like an eternal youth because of his authority over death, rebirth and immortality.

I was interested to find especially with the parallels with the forces of nature, that Shiva is understood to be the same person as Rudra. Rudra is the the god of the roaring storms, a fierce, destructive deity. In fact today’s Shiva probably developed from this god of storms that was written about in some of the oldest texts of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, dating back as far as 1700 BC. Shiva was and is the God of the storm, but he is more than just destruction.

Just as I mentioned the cycle and balance of the seasons, Fall Winter, Spring and Summer, Shiva’s destructive force is also part of a cosmic balance. Lord Shiva is the destroyer of the world, following the god Brahma, the creator of all things, and Vishnu the god who’s role it is to preserves. And of course Shiva is always ready to bring back the destruction and chaos to get things moving again.

But Shiva’s propensity for destruction isn’t just about the material world. It’s also about the internal spiritual world. While Shiva is responsible for death and destruction in the universe, Shiva is also the God that yogis call on in their journey to destroy the ego. They call on Shiva, the destroyer, to come to help them destroy the false sense of self, that keeps them separated from the great oneness of being. Shiva helps the yogi, and helps us when we acknowledge death, to loosen the obsession with ourselves, with this life and all our everyday needs, to look at a bigger picture. All that has a beginning by necessity must have an end. With his reminders of death and destruction, the impermanence of life, Shiva reminds us that our lives also are impermanent, and helps us to destroy the sense of ego that distracts us from deeper connections.

Beyond destroying a sense of ego, Shiva is also helps break old habits and attachments. Just like the cycle of nature and the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, Shiva brings helps destroy old habits to make new life possible for us. Thus the power of destruction associated with Lord Shiva has great purifying power, both on a more personal level when problems make us see reality more clearly, as on a more universal level.

Although he is the great cosmic destroyer, Lord Shiva is the Lord of mercy and compassion, because he protects devotees by destroying the forces of lust, greed, and anger. Shiva actually means auspicious, kind, or gracious one. It’s not what typically comes to mind when we think of the God who symbolizes destruction in the universe, is it. Auspicious, kind, gracious one…

We know that nature can be destructive, and the Hindu pantheon makes room for the destructive inclination of the universe. But the last kind of destructive force I want to explore is more personal. I want to talk about a destructive force that is scarier, and certainly more mysterious than seasons or Shiva. I want to talk a little bit about the destructive force that rests within each one of us. It’s in there for each one of us. For some it has been ignored and denied. For others it has been nurtured and heightened perhaps too much. But each one of us has a seed for destruction within.

It reminds me a little bit of a story that is attributed to Cherokee Indians. I don’t know how true to the culture the story is, but I have heard it several times. It goes something like this:

One evening an old Cherokee man told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One wolf is anger, jealousy, superiority, pride, aggression and ego.

The other wolf is serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, generosity, and compassion

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Well, grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee told him, ‘The one you feed.’

I love this story as an example of cultivating character traits. The more energy we invest in certain feelings, the more they become manifest in our world. We can spend our time and energy in greed and anger, or we can invest in love and compassion.

But in light of today’s topic and the occasional necessity for destruction and aggression in the world, I’m inclined to find a different way. Perhaps instead of feeding only one wolf, and starving the other, we should do our best to tame both of them. After all both of these inclinations are necessary in the world. Fortunately most of us live in an environment where aggression and destruction aren’t called for on a daily basis. But we are not so far removed from a world in which that aggression was necessary for survival. It was eat or get eaten, kill or be killed.

My point is, perhaps both of these wolves have something to offer in our lives. There is a time for compassion, but there is also a time for defending oneself. For everything thing there is a season.

I’m going to make a leap with this metaphor of the two wolves into the realm of science. It is commonly believed by evolutionary biologists today that the domesticated dog most likely evolved from the Grey Wolf. That evolution and our deeply rooted relationship with dogs occurred for or one very compelling reason, and it’s not chew toys.

Both humans and wolves are social hunters. Unlike nearly every other predator on the planet, humans, and wolves hunt their prey in groups. And there is reason to believe that wolves would gather around and scavenge the remains of human hunts, to the point that these two creatures, learned to hunt together. Both their aggressive capability and their inclination toward sharing allowed them to thrive. The balance of creation and destruction was the key to their mutual survival.

And the aggressive inclination isn’t just there for the hunters of our tribe. Women, perhaps even more than men are reluctant to conjure up the destructive forces within. No, not me. But I challenge any mother here, or any mother anywhere, to allow something hurtful to happen to their child. The emotional and physical response of a mother protecting a child can, and should evoke an untold force of potential aggression.

We do all have two wolves within us. One wolf is anger, jealousy, pride, aggression and ego. The other wolf is serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, generosity, and compassion. And as scary as it may be to face up to, we rely on both of those forces in time. Creation and destruction, a sacred balance, in the earth, in God, in our hearts.

As we head deeper into the fall, and as we head into a month of discussion death here at UUFLB, I want to challenge us to embrace some of the scary stuff. Embrace the darkness, embrace the cycles of life and death, embrace destruction and decay. Because these are part of life. They are part of us.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Prodigal Children"

2011-10-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Prodigal Children
The prodigal son is a story that is pretty embedded in Christian culture. It’s in songs and art. The picture on your Order of Service is actually Remebrant’s visual interpretation of the story. It’s a story that I didn’t know much about until fairly recently. It’s a prominent piece of a book call “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. It’s basically a treatise on Universalism. Anyway, I found the story and the layers beneath it pretty amazing and I wanted to share it with you, as we talk about forgiveness this month.

I think it’s perfect for Unitarians for a couple of different reasons. First, of all, it speaks to us at various theological levels. Now originally this parable from Jesus is clearly meant to be a description of relationship with God. It’s all about God’s grace and love, and our ability to accept that love. It’s a Christian parable from the Bible. For some of you that means good things, for others it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. And there’s the beautiful part. The story works equally well from a Humanist perspective. There’s much to be learned from the prodigal son not just about our relationships with God, but about our relationship with other people, and with ourselves.

I also love this story because it is the perfect example of Universalism in the Bible. It’s all about God’s grace and forgiveness. Remember that’s what that second U stands for in UU. Universalism, Universal Salvation, essentially forgiveness. And it’s that second U that we could use a little more of as Unitarians in the 21st Century. We Unitarians get so caught up in what we do to be good, as if love / salvation is something we can earn. If we just work a little harder, if we just give a little more, if we just learn the right words to say we will somehow be “in.” Well, Universalism and the prodigal son teach us a different lesson. They teach us that the love that we seek, call it acceptance, salvation, community, peace. The wholeness that we seek is there for the taking, if we just open our hearts to accept it.

So on to the story. This story comes up in only one version of the Gospels, it is in Luke along with a huge collection of parables. He’s telling story after story.

Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

Obviously, this is not the kindest thing for a son to say to his father. “Hey, you’re getting older and I want to have some fun now. “Why don’t you just give me what I have coming anyway, and we’ll call it good?” I can’t imagine that getting a good reaction from anyone I know. But it seemed to work with this father.

“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs.

This last piece is worth unpacking because we don’t get exactly how insulting this situation is. By hiring himself out to a citizen of that country, we put himself in that person’s care. He was not quite a slave, but he was far less than a man of equal rights in that country. What’s more is we can safely assume that those hearing the story were Jews, and they would assume the characters were Jews. You don’t have to know much about Judaism to know that pork is a big ‘no-no’. It is not kosher, it is ritualisticly unclean. So far beyond what you or I might think about the unpleasantness of livestock, this son had sold himself to work in an industry that was both physically unpleasant and morally problematic.

The story continues, “He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.” That’s a pretty sad state of affairs. “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. So he got up and went to his father.

This is a moment of extreme humility. He didn’t say, ‘well, Dad’s wealthy, I’m sure he can take me back into the house. Of course he’ll forgive me. I mean, I’m his son after all. I may have really screwed up, but Dad will get over it.’ No. This is an important transition in his attitude, especially as we are talking about forgiveness.
The son came to a deep realization that he had made a grave mistake. He had squandered everything he had, to live in a sub-human existence. That sounds like shame to me. So he didn’t say, “sure, Dad will take me back as his son.” He thought, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.”

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

Can you imagine what it would take for you to say that to your parent. Or what that would sound like coming out of your child’s mouth. “I’m no longer worthy to be called your daughter.” “I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” That is heartbreaking stuff 2000 years ago, or today.

“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.” And this is where it gets really extravagant. “Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate.” Now, killing the fatted calf is like maxing our your credit card to call in a catering company. It’s a big, big deal.

“For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ the servant explained, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
Now the Bible really likes s sibling rivalry. “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

I know I can sympathize with the older son’s frustrations. We all get a little cranky when someone else gets rewarded when we were the ones doing all the work. It’s just not fair.
But this little passage to me is the crux of Universalist message, and the crux of what we so need to hear as Unitarians. The son said, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.” This is the Unitarian do-gooder par excellence. All these years I have slaved… it begs the question, who asked you to slave? Certainly you weren’t forced to do this work that you are so committed to. And what were you trying to earn in the process? The love of your father? A gold star? The Unitarian of the year award?

“All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.”

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

Like I said, this parable is most obviously about relationship with God in the Christian view. God’s grace is always available. Even after we commit the most egregious acts of betrayal, if we return in sincere repentance, we are forgiven and welcomed home with a celebration. That’s what this who concept of being dead and alive again is about. Over and over again there are ideas of finding a new life in faith. You know it through people being born again. But that’s actually exactly what the ritual of baptism is about. “This brother of yours was dead and is alive again.”

But this story of forgiveness isn’t just about Christian faith. It’s also about how we treat one another, and how we find forgiveness in ourselves. Especially this piece about celebrating because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. It’s really dramatic language, but it’s practically the same thing when we have a broken relationship with any person. When there is someone in our lives we cannot forgive, we lose them. We lose another human being, with all that they have to offer. That’s a big price to pay for a disagreement. But when we are able to forgive or reconcile, it’s like that person returning into our lives is revived. It’s cause for great celebration. Forgiving is big business.

And accepting forgiveness is equally big stuff. It’s often something that we don’t do very well as Unitarians. How often do we fall into the trap of being the older brother, slaving for the cause we believe in, or always doing the right thing. How often do we feel like our noble efforts have gone unacknowledged? It’s part of our Puritan history. It’s part of Unitarianism, through and through.

But the other part of our tradition, Universalism has a much more compelling message. It tells us that love and worth can’t be bought with action. “Slaving” for another is missing the point. Enjoying a relationship with them and sharing a life with them is much more productive.

In the end, who is happy in this story? Well, the younger brother has quite the journey of adventure, hardship and humility. But in the end he finds that love is there if he knocks on the door. In the end he faces a huge challenge, the challenge of forgiving himself. Remember, he said, “I’m not fit to be called your son.” But through working on that relationship, he was able to be forgiven, and to forgive himself.

The older brother, who has slaved all his life to make his father pleased, the brother who couldn’t bring himself to come back into the family home after his lost brother returned alive, seems like he never forgave. And he found himself in a self-inflicted hell on earth. He found himself angry and separated from all that he loved, because he couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive.

Before I wrap up I want to address one big lingering question about forgiveness, and about the example of these two brothers. Is the point that we should go off and mess around and waste our time and money and not do any good for anyone until our luck runs out, and then ask forgiveness? Is forgiveness a free pass to live life as we choose?

No. If it were, I wouldn’t be talking about it. As Unitarian Universalists, we, and especially I, talk about living your faith, a lot. It comes up in just about every worship service, living our your values, making them manifest in the world.

I realize I say that a lot, “living out your faith.” But the truth is we always live out our faith. Our actions are always a reflection of how we think really think and feel. They don’t always match what we say our values are, but they do match what our values really are. Encouraging forgiveness is not a blank check to go out and live a life that totally contradicts your values. Because the question isn’t about if we will live out our values. The question is which values will we live out.

Will we live out a faith of judgment, like the older brother, where love is something we must earn, something that is meted our like a fee per service, or will we live out a faith of acceptance and forgiveness, with the knowledge that reconciliation is always waiting? Will we live out a faith of judgment or a faith of forgiveness? The outcome of the story I think gives you an indication of which side I want to stand on.

“My son, said the father, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” May we remember the fact that we are always in the midst of the spirit of life and love. And when we drift from that knowledge, which we are bound to do, let us return to that power, with an open mind, and forgiveness in our heart.

-Amen-

Sermon - "The Community Well"

2011-09-12T14:44:00.001-07:00

The community Well

According to the Bible, paradise featured four rivers flowing in cardinal directions out from the roots of the Tree of Life. . Their waters symbolized life and nourishment. In Bali, springs are attributed with healing or magical powers. For Buddhists waterfalls symbolize the “permanent impermanence” of the universe, which is partly why they play and important role in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting. In Shinto tradition, waterfalls are held sacred and standing under one is thought to purify the soul.

Throughout human experience water has been a source of life, not just for quenching our thirst. It also is the perfect symbol for our religious lives. Whether it is the ever-changing nature of a waterfall, the peaceful serenity of a still lake, the life-giving sustenance, it is the perfect symbol for the complexity of the spirit.

So coming from our different backgrounds and different life experiences, today we construct together a community well, a vessel to hold our hopes and dreams and fears We have done that in a symbolic sense, through ritual. But I want to challenge us as a community to live up to the potential of what that vessel represents, a container for all of our experiences, our joys and our pains, our hopes and despairs. A source that we can draw from in our time of need. Because that is what church is all about. We somehow were magically reminded of that reality ten years ago.

We all remember where we were when we learned what happened on September 11th. For my generation, it was our version of the JFK assassination. It was the first national tragedy that really flipped our world upside down. From that moment on, nothing would be the same.
Ten years ago today I left my parents home in Tulsa and boarded and airplane on my way to Washington D.C. I was to begin an internship there at the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Washington Office for faith in action. It was an exciting time, I was eager to get there. So when the captain told us we were going to have a detour, my initial reaction was a simple annoyance. “Can’t you get anywhere in an airplane anymore.” Then, probably fifteen minutes later, the captain came back on the speakers to explain that an airplane had run into the World Trade Center, and there was a terrorist attack on the Pentagon. Because all flights were to land immediately, we were being routed to Louisville Kentucky.
Of course if you were at home watching the news you knew exactly what that meant. And there’s not an American alive who doesn’t know what happened that day. But with only those little pieces of information, an airplane ran into the World Trade Center, and there’s been a terrorist attack on the Pentagon, I landed in a city where I knew no one. Fortunately I had the resources and the wits to get a hotel room immediately. So I went, and sat in my room, and I watched as the horrible image of that airplane was shown over and over and over again.
Finally it occurred to me that there was probably a UU church in town. So I looked them up in the yellow pages, and sure enough, there they were. I called and found that the church was open that evening, and they would be holding a vigil for anyone who was interested. All were welcome.
I don’t know how I got to the church. I hardly remember the church itself. And I don’t remember a minister being there at all. What I do remember was a room full of people gathered in a big circle. In the center was a chalice and many candles. And as people felt moved they lit a candle and offered a few words from their heart. Some spoke words of fear and pain. Others were concerned for loved ones in NY. Still others spoke words of solidarity with the Muslim community around the world.
There was no magic in the gathering. No one had the perfect words of comfort or a concise political analysis. We were all too stunned to offer anything resembling perfect. That gathering didn’t offer me any answers. What it did offer was a place to bring my fear and my loneliness. It was a place to come and be real and to be myself in the presence of others.

That was a terrible few days of my life. I dare say some of the worst, being stuck in an unknown city alone at a time of disaster. They were painful days. But at the same time, I feel tremendously grateful for having had a community to turn to in my time of need. It was as simple as pulling out the yellow pages in my hotel room, and I knew I could walk into a place where I would be nurtured. I feel profoundly grateful for that experience, and I wish it had been the experience of more Americans.

Because, being a part of a loving community changes people. Knowing that you can bring all of who you are, knowing that you will be cared for not in spite of who you are, but because of who you are does something to the human heart. It cracks it open a little bit.

That’s why I care about religious community, because it has the potential to change people’s lives, and to change the way they live in the world.

Not religion that comes from on high, but religion that is built on the foundation of community. Not religion that limits God’s love to a few chosen people, but on that celebrates the truth that love is a renewable resource. Not a religion that invests in exclusion, but one that throws its doors open, like the arms of a loving grandparent.

When tragedy strikes we have these momentary opportunities to understand our priorities. It’s happening now as Texas burns. It happened not long ago with Hurricane Irene to residents of New England. And here in Laguna Beach we have had our share of fires, landslides and floods.
Forget about the house or the car. Forget about the objects. Are the people I love still okay? That’s what it boils down to. Are they okay, and how can I let them know I love them?

But ten years ago, in the wake of the biggest national tragedy of my lifetime, our president told the country to go out and shop. He told us to fill the gaping hole in our hearts with consumer electronics and cars. And he promised revenge.
That strategy simply did not work. It doesn’t work, it never will work. We are today more fearful, more militant, more angry, and certainly more cynical than we were on September 12th 2001. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to tell you that shopping and revenge are not the best ways to heal your wounds.

Healing doesn’t come out of revenge and shopping. Healing and growth come out of very difficult and messy work. Whether it is in the face of terrorist attack, or in the face of the pains of our every day life, aging, disease, broken relationships, financial trouble, healing does not come with quick and easy answers of getting revenge or getting new shiny things.
The real challenge of religious community and of our lives is to hold the real and profound pain that enters our life. And at the same time, turn our minds and hearts toward hope. It’s a difficult task for an individual and a difficult task for a community. But it is one of the greatest tests, perhaps the test of a worth-while faith. When you come out on the other end of fear and pain, is there still room for love?

The level of cynicism in our country, and even in our midst as a congregation is overwhelming at times. So I want to lay down a few pieces of Unitarian Univesalist belief for you to chew on the next time you talk about our woes. We believe that people are generally good, and they want to do what is best for their community. We may disagree with their tactics, but we believe that people are at their core, good. THEY are not out to get US. Quite the contrary. WE all want a world where future generations can thrive.

People are generally good, and our world is good, full of life giving resources with the power and potential to heal. That’s right. Nature is an amazing miraculous thing with untold powers of healing.

Yes, there is a tremendous environmental disaster in our midst. Yes there is political turmoil in our country and around the world. But when we let go of hope in a better world, when we let go of our faith in love, our faith in the healing power of nature, faith in community; when we let go of our faith in goodness, we have already lost.

This sermon sounds rather grand with its claims about interpreting September 11th, and our annual water communion. But what I’m talking about is much simpler. It’s actually what we do every Sunday here when we gather in worship and share our joys and sorrows.
Although it takes a while and sometimes people make us uncomfortable, we take time nearly every Sunday to speak aloud our Joys and Sorrows. As we celebrate Joys and grieve our Sorrows, we remind one another of the complexity of life. In sharing our joys and pains our relationships are deepened and we are reminded that we are not alone. Through those connections one to another, we weave a fragile tapestry of hope.

On September 11, 2011 may we embrace hope rather than despair, and love rather than revenge. And in so doing begin the healing of our community, and the world around us.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Descendants of Abraham"

2011-08-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

All summer in our worship services, we have been talking about the sources and the principles of Unitarian Universalism. We talked about personal experience of the sacred, world religions, humanism. We talked about the web that connects us all, and about the sense of community in our ever shrinking globe. All these things are important to our faith tradition. Although we forget it at times, the biggest source of our tradition is Christianity.
To answer a question that comes up over and over again, no Unitarian Universalism is not a Christian denomination. It began as a reform movement within Christianity. But by 20th Century, it long exceeded the bounds of Christian thought to include other religious sources, as well as humanist teachings that challenge the very notion of religious authority. Yes, there are Christians who are Unitarian Universalists, and yes, we did develop out of Christian roots. But today we embrace far too broad of a religious spectrum to be considered a Christian denomination. No, Unitarian Universalism is not a Christian denomination. Still, Christianity is in our religious DNA.
The other source that we will explore today is Jewish heritage. Judaism comes to Unitarianism through less direct sources. Obviously, Jesus was a Jew and Christianity first came to the Jewish community. In that way, as Judaism informs Christianity, it also informs Unitarian Universalism. But more recently, Unitarian Universalism has been impacted by Judaism in the 20th century, as humanist leaning Jews found a new home here.

I called this worship service Descends of Abraham, in recognition of a common source. And I must also mention Islam. While Islam is the other widely known Abrahamic religion, it has not influenced Unitarian Universalism as significantly as Judaism and Christianity have. So for today, as we talk about sources of our faith we will focus on Christianity and Judaism, and hold Islam for another time.

First and foremost, Unitarian Universalism has been shaped by Chrstianty. Obviously, Christianity is an incredibly vast tradition. With around two billion adherents around the globe, it’s no surprise that it means a great many different things to different people. Even within our own country, it seems that different groups claiming the same tradition couldn’t possibly be talking about the same thing.

But, there is one theme in Christianity that is central to the tradition in the United States. It’s a theme that clearly has shapes Unitarian Universalism. It is, a profound and repeated emphasis on love. It is the lynch pin of Christian belief.

We all know that the whole tradition of Christianity centers on the person of Jesus. Whether or not you agree, Christians believe that Jesus brings salvation to humanity. We know that, living in the United States this is sort of basic cultural knowledge.

But I want to dig a little bit deeper. Jesus is a savior in two different ways. And BOTH of those ways hinge on love. The way that Jesus offers salvation that most of us hear about in contemporary Christianity is the idea of a sacrifice. We hear about Jesus being sacrificed on the cross to pay for the sins of humanity. Through his suffering, the sins of Christians, who accept him as their savior can be forgiven for their sins. The official word for this theology is substitutionary atonement. Jesus was the substitute who atoned, or paid for the sins of humanity.

Offering your only child as a physical sacrifice is a pretty gruesome picture. But, I want you to keep in mind that the whole concept of that sacrifice is about God’s love. God loved the world so much, that he made the most unthinkable sacrifice.
His death on the cross was a sacrifice made out of love for humanity. In the most common sense, we hear of God, sending Jesus as his son, as a sacrifice. But there’s also a sense of self-sacrifice, civil disobedience style. Jesus knew that his radical message of love was so counter-cultural, so dangerous to the mainstream, that it endangered his life. And rather than give up that struggle or pay tribute to the political tyrants of his day, he said no to evil and yes to love. He knowingly sacrificed himself to stay true to his message. He loved the world so much, that he was willing to give his life to stand up for his life-giving truth.

The way most Christians speak of Jesus as a savior today is through a sacrifice made in love. But as I said, Jesus was also a saving figure in second and very different way, a way that most Unitarians find more compelling, a way that is also centered on love. Most Unitarians who find inspiration in Jesus, find it in his teachings of love, acceptance, and justice. Over and over again in the gospels, we hear of Jesus spending his time and being compassionate with the most unlikely of characters. Tax collectors, peasants, foreigners, women, adulterers, children, and the list goes on. None of these people would have been understood as worthy of the attention of a great religious figure, and yet these are the exact people who Jesus taught and shared meals with. These are the people he touched and healed. These are the people that he offered hope to.

Jesus explained to them that all was required of them was to love their neighbors and to love God. Nothing else mattered. Not their wealth or role in society. Jesus taught, by the example of his life, that the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR AND LOVING GOD. Let me repeat that. Jesus taught, by the example of his life, that the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR AND LOVING GOD. Christianity has come to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But the central thing that Jesus taught, the thing you can read for yourself, is a message of love in the present moment.

When I say love is the center of the Christian message, I’m not talking about an easy love, a puppy love of simple answers. I’m talking about real, rich, nuanced life-saving love. It’s the kind of love that we have heard described a thousand times in weddings, in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. You will recognize it when I read it, I promise. What you may not know is that this passage that is so familiar isn’t about romantic love at all. Paul wasn’t writing about marriage. He was writing to a community in turmoil. He was writing about the kid of love that sustains a community.

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

When I say that love is the central message of Christianity, this is the sort of love I am talking about.

If the message that we inherit from Christianity is all about love, then the message we inherit from Judaism is all about community. Judaism and Christianity are radically different in a very important way. Earlier I spoke about how Jesus is a savior within Christianity. His role is to save individual people, individual souls.

For Jews, salvation is a very different thing. Rather than concern for individual salvation in the next life, the Jewish community focuses on saving the entire community in this life. It’s not about what happens after you die, it’s about what happens to us collectively here and now. Judaism is concerned with the health and well-being of the community, because our mutual life depends on it.

The sense of communal investment goes all the way back to the Torah, the Old Testament. We see God rewarding or punishing entire communities in the Old Testament. Most classically this happens with Noah and the flood. But, there are countless other stories of God punishing or rewarding and entire civilizations. Think of the Israelites escape from Egypt, or the plagues that the Egyptians suffered.

Now it couldn’t be that every single one of those Egyptians was evil, or that every single one of the Israelites was a good person. Could it? We sometimes want to protest the fairness of such a God. How could it be that everyone’s fate is wrapped up all together for group judgment?
It doesn’t seem fair in these old stories. But more and more, this is the way we Unitarian Universalists have come to understand salvation. We are in this thing together. Whether we are talking about environmental devestation, racial injustice, gender oppression, nuclear proliferation, we have come to realize that our own liberation is tied up with everyone else’s. Salvation or destruction is wrapped up in an intricate web, that we are each connected to. It’s not so different from those stories of the great flood, not so different at all.
For the Jews of the Old Testament, and the Jews of today, working to maintain community is a central task of religious life. And for us as Unitarian Universalists, building community, especially in the midst of our theological diversity is the central task of our religious life.

More recently, Judaism has shaped our tradition in a different way. After the horrors of World War II, many Jews became increasingly uncomfortable with static ideologies, whether political or religious. They moved away from concrete belief in one God as the core of religious community. And they moved toward a belief that peaceful human community is more important that religious ideology. They essentially became humanists. And along with humanists of many other backgrounds, those Jews, found that Unitarian Universalism was a natural place for them to come. What they brought with them, was a culture that emphasized community. They also brought with them the hard earned lesson that any ideology that claims to have the authoritative answer over others, can become deadly in and frightening instant. They brought, and they remind Unitarian Universalism that celebrating diversity within our community is an essential guard against tyranny.

So, we get a message of love from Christianity, and a message about the central role of community from Judaism. These two core messages of our tradition have been inherited from our roots.

But what does that mean for you, what does that mean when you walk out these doors?

Well, first of all, it means that we need to remember that they are us. Those Christians that we often point fingers at because of political differences, they are the foundation of our own faith. Although it may lead them to different conclusions, the central message of faith for Christians as for us, is one of love.
I’m not saying that all of Christianity or all Judaism is perfect. I also wouldn’t say that about Unitarian Universalism. What I am saying is that we often short change them and dismiss the good that they offer. I feel sometimes like Unitarian Universalism is the teenager, rebelling against the parent, refusing to see that perhaps what the parent has to offer is sage advice.

Our roots in Christianity and Judaism mean one more thing for our lives. Beyond a history lesson or a theology lesson, I want you to hear that the message of these two great traditions holds true for us today.

For us as Unitarian Universalists, that the message in Micah that we read earlier holds as true today as it ever did.

The translation in our hymnal is, “What does the Eternal ask from you, but to be just and kind, and live in a quiet fellowship with your God?”

That’s it. That’s all that is required, to be just and kind, and to deepen your connection to your sense of hope. That is all that is required.
Your initial reaction may be to say “Required? Who does he think he is to tell me something is ‘required’?” I want you to hear this loud and clear, all that is required of you is to be just and kind, and to hold on to your source of hope. That’s it. You’re not required to be top of your class, or to win the race. You’re not required to have your finances in perfect order. You’re not required to have all the answers or even to know the right questions. You’re not required to do any of that.

Because all that is required of you, is to be just and kind, and hold on to the source of your hope. The rest simply doesn’t matter that much.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Roots and Branches"

2011-08-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Roots and Branches

I’d like to start this sermon with a little exercise. And, I literally mean exercise. If you are comfortable doing so, I’d like you to stand up where you are. Okay. Now I’d like you to pick up your personal belongings, your purse or hat, or whatever you have with you, and go and find a seat in the opposite area of the room. No this is not a joke. I know this is going to take a minute, but it has a purpose, trust me. So if you normally sit on this side of the room, I’d like you to move over there. And if you normally sit near the back, come on up here to the front, and vice versa. Trust me, there is a point to this little experiment. Jeff, Terry, Oakley, I want you guys up here on the front row.

Thank you for indulging me a little bit in that. This morning we are talking about making room for new growth and taking some chances. I wanted you to move for two different reasons. One, is to show you how accustomed you have probably become to sitting where you normally sit. It probably feels a little funny to be at a different place in the church. This is probably a little uncomfortable for you regulars. Visitor’s you’ll have to excuse me for just a moment.

But I also want you to notice what has changed about your experience sitting there. Maybe you are a little closer to me, and you can see and hear better. Maybe you are closer to the back where you can get the big picture view with the chalice and all. And you can see all the people in front of you participating. Maybe you have moved into the sunshine, or into a cooler spot. Maybe you’ll notice being closer to the piano when we sing later.

These little changes can make a world of difference. Especially when we have done the same thing for a VERY long time. Today we are talking about striking the delicate balance between honoring the past, the tradition, and risking growing into a new future. It’s a central challenge for churches, to honor the past and to remain relevant in a changing world, and it’s a challenge in each of our lives, as we find strength and comfort in the known, but also learn and grow into the future.

I chose our opening hymn today because it speaks to that delicate balance. It holds two different realities at the same time, leaning on to a comforting stable faith, and dreaming of a better future. Honoring a comfortable and secure faith in God in heaven, and dreaming of a better future in this life, dreaming of freedom from slavery.

The song that we sang is a really good example of the Spirituals that were created during slavery. “Come and go with me to that land where I’m bound. There’ll be freedom in that land. There’s by justice in that land. There’ll be singing in that land, where I’m bound.”

This song is obviously about the promise of heaven in another life. But the song is also about liberation in this life. It’s a song about slaves escaping to the North. This one very powerful song celebrates the solid rock of faith in God above, but it also celebrates taking a tremendous risk for a better life. It holds both realities at the same time. And it’s not unique to today’s hymn.

Other spirituals have the same dual message of hope. They are rooted in solid faith, and hoping for a very risky journey toward freedom in this life. Some people even say that these spirituals that came about during slavery taught specific ways that escaped slaves might evade capture. “Wade in the Water” It’s poetic faith language, and it is a reminder that wading through a stream or a pond was the best, perhaps the only way to lose the scent of dogs that might be sent on the chase. Another song, “The Gospel Train,” encourages escapees to stow away on the train headed North. And the spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which is also in our hymnal, is a coded map to the underground railroad. It’s number 152 if you want to check it out.

For African American slaves, and later for African American’s, music was life saving stuff. Who hasn’t been moved by a spiritual or a freedom song at some point? They embraced a permanent faith in God, solid as a rock. And they also speak of an unfulfilled dream, a promise of freedom in this life. The power in these songs comes not just from the beauty of the music. The power also rests in the dual emphasis of of roots in a solid faith, and branching out into a more promising future.

The metaphor of roots and branches that I’m speaking of today came to me through discussions of children’s religious education in Unitarian Universalist churches. As you might guess, we aim to strike a very delicate balance in those classes. For our children as well as for adults, we aim for a balance between teaching the roots of Unitarian Universalism, it’s Christian history, the Seven Principles, it’s commitment to justice, all of the stuff that is the clear foundation of our tradition, and teaching a more expansive vision of faith through various world religions and contemporary ethical concepts. We want our children to be grounded in this faith tradition, and at the same time, feel empowered to explore and expand their mind and spirit.

In discussion of religious education, the language that is used often is “roots and branches.” It’s a critical balance in developing our minds. But the idea of roots and branches also resonates with me when we talk about our wider church life, not just religious education.

We are also called to the difficult task of honoring both our roots and our branches as a congregation. We are called to honor and amazing 65 year history that has brought us to this point, and to answer the call of growing into a vibrant expansive future that is relevant in 2011.

And frankly, a part of me fears that we are in danger. Like many other churches, we are in danger of becoming a bit like a root bound plant. I’m not much of a gardener. But I do know one very important thing. If you keep a plant in a pot, eventually if that plant grows long enough and big enough, its roots will outgrow the pot. It will become root-bound. The roots of the plant will grow so dense and so tight that they tangle we will literally strangle the plant.

At a certain point, to take care of your plants, you have to go through the time consuming process of finding a new, larger pot for that plant. And you have to repot it, giving it more room and space to grow, so that those roots can once again expand and absorb nutrients from the soil, at the same time, allowing the branches to grow broader and more verdant.

Today, I want to challenge you to think of ways that you might initiate some change either here at the Fellowship, in your own lives, or both. How might you make some new room for our roots to find fresh soil so that our breaches can reach toward the light? What do you want to see happen here that is different?

Since I have been the minister here at UUFLB, I have sparked several different changes, experiments. The drum circle is the latest addition. Before that I encouraged getting these televisions to use in our worship service. And I started monthly worship themes. And I started coffee talk a few years ago. I have also experimented with adult Religious Education Classes. It’s also important to point out that I have tried some things that didn’t go over so well. One of the adult RE classes that I created was essentially canceled because it wasn’t a topic that others were interested in. And early on I tried holding a mid-week meditation group. That also didn’t last long.

This is not to give you a laundry list of my work. Remember, some of these projects failed. The point is that I have offered as much of my vision as I could. I knew that some of it would fail, but I trusted this community to be okay with that, to know that it’s not the end of the world if an experiment doesn’t go the way we had hoped.

Now I’m asking you to do a bit of the same thing. How might you make room for fresh soil and more sunlight, so that our Fellowships roots and branches can remain healthy? What do you want to see happen here? If you are willing to help, then there’s a very strong possibility that we can bring that dream into fruition. I’m inviting you to change it up, knowing full and well that it may not be perfect, it may not work at all. But trying something new is what keeps us alive.

If you have been doing the same thing here at the Fellowship for more than five years, consider stopping. Consider finding some other way to feed the life of this community. Consider letting someone else have a chance to contribute in the way that you have. Consider learning some new way of giving. Consider cracking your pot open a little bit.

This doesn’t mean stopping your involvement in church. It means find an idea that makes you grow and stretch. And doing that thing that makes you reach toward the light. You know it’s funny, if we do the same thing in worship too many times, people will complain that it becomes rote and meaningless. “That’s too Catholic,” people start to say, “reading the same thing over and over every week.”

The bottom line is, I want you doing what you are passionate about. I want your involvement at UUFLB to be something that puts a smile on your face, not something that just falls in your lap because you’ve always done it. And the same thing goes for life outside of the Fellowship. Life is way too short not to try a new adventure every once in a while.

I think Judy Shepard embodies this principle better than anyone I know. If she’s intrigued by something, she tries it. She wrote a novel in a month. She got her certification as a professional chef. She took painting classes in Europe. Those are the adventures I know about since knowing here just 5 years. The important thing is she did these things because she wanted to. Not because it was a career move, or it was expected of her. Certainly not because it was easy or what she had always done. Judy has a tremendous commitment to trying new things. It’s a spiritual discipline that we call could learn from.

And the growing and learning doesn’t stop as we age. It may change, but it doesn’t stop. Barbara made a very helpful distinction to me last week about her retirement. She said I didn’t retire from, I wanted to retire to. That is to say that she didn’t want to retire to get away from work. She wanted to retire to free herself up to do different things, things that she cared about. I didn’t retire from work, I retired to pursue the things that make my heart sing.

People often marvel and the longevity and vitality of many of our stalwart members here. More and more I don’t think it’s because they eat special diet, or exercise a certain way. It’s not about taking care of an aging body so much as it is staying engaged in the world, staying curious, staying active.

The bottom line is staying vital is about transcending the boundaries of you past. It requires pushing out into the world, into deeper and richer soil, so that you can reach new heights, stretching toward the sunlight. It’s true for trees; it’s true for us as individuals, and it’s true for us as a community.

Unitarian Universalism is a living tradition. It’s right there on the title of our hymnals, “Singing the Living Tradition.” I took this language for granted until a friend pointed out to me the powerful balance. We are a living tradition, rooted in history and reaching out to be relevant in an ever-changing world.

You often hear me talk about Unitarian and Universalist history. It’s long and rich. The history of Unitarian thought goes all the way back to early Christian community, when in 325, a dissident who questioned the doctrine of the trinity raised enough dispute within the church to bring on the Council of Nicea. The hallmark moment of Christian doctrine.
And even earlier Origen of Alexandria, one of the great church fathers began to publicly question the concept of Hell. As early as 200 AD he was suggestion Universalist theology. The historical roots of Unitarian and Universalist belief are incredibly old. We have very deep roots.

But we also are a tradition of branches. This faith that we so love is a grand experiment. That’s right, this is one big experiment. In 1961, the Unitarians and the Universlists joined together to join a brand new kind of religious community. One where you didn’t have to believe any one particular thing. You just had to come and participate, you just had to bring all of who you were and enjoy the journey with some fellow travelers.

Whenever ANYONE tells you, “this is the way we have always done it.” I want you to remember that this tradition, is in it’s very nature a grand experiment. The closing hymn that we are about to sing was commissioned in 1961 to celebrate the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists. The language if building a new kind of church was inspiring then. Let it also resonate with us today, as we continue the experiment, to try new things in our lives, to bust free of the pots that contain our roots and reach both deeper and higher than we ever thought we could.

-Amen-

Supporting Skeptics

2011-08-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Editor,

On July 29th you ran and article describing how “Backyard Skeptics”, a group of atheists and agnostics had recently purchased advertising space on bus shelters to voice their views on God. As an Orange County minister, I want to say thank you for running this story, and thank you to those brave skeptics who spent their hard-earned money to display a diversity of opinion about an important topic.
It is so encouraging to hear genuine diversity in the public discussion of religion in Orange County. It’s true that there are growing movements to embrace interfaith dialog. However, the view that there may be no God at all, is typically cast aside as somehow irrelevant or mean-spirited.
It fact, the messages sponsored by this group talk about their own beliefs only. It is sincere self-expression. They do not denigrate the beliefs of others. This is a marked improvement over the “new atheists,” the cadre or recent authors who insult the intelligence of people of faith, and speak only of the worst examples of religious life in contrast to the best examples of scientific achievement.
I’m proud to say “Backyard Skeptics” would be welcome at my church. We encourage questioning and doubt, and think it is the foundation for a growing mind AND SPIRIT. In fact many Unitarian Universalist ministers are themselves atheists. I am not an atheist my self, but I appreciate their contributions to our shared community. The reason for my writing today isn’t to recruit the Backyard Skeptics to join us, but to say keep up the good work. Your sincere messages will certainly inspire your neighbors to talk, and maybe even think about the questions you raise.

Sincerely,
Rev. Kent Doss

sermon - "Global Village"

2011-08-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

A Global Village

Today’s sermon is going to start a little differently. I’d like to show you all a short video from youtube. It’s a video that explains some of the expansion of technology in modern life, and how the technology impacts the globe.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
I wanted to show you that video for a couple of reasons. First it makes the point clearer and faster than I can. Technology, particularly computer technology has permeated daily life for Americans. And the speed at which it develops and grows is exponential. Technology has changed the way we live our lives and the way that we relate to one another, in our families, in classrooms and around the globe.

The world we live in is intricately connected in a sometimes shocking way. But this shrinking world idea is nothing new. It’s defiantly more apparent these days, and a little disturbing because it is moving so rapidly. But people have anticipated this global connectedness via the internet for a very, very long time, even before the world wide web was ever created, some folks anticipated a new technology that would connect the masses in a whole new way.

You may be familiar with the name Marshal McLuhan. There has been some talk about him in recent weeks because July 21st marked the centennial of his birthday.

He was an English teacher and a public thinker. But most importantly, he was a media critic. He came up with Timothy Leary’s famous saying, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” about engaging in your intellectual life and political action, using LSD, and dropping out of society to practice self reliance in the 1960s. Needless to say he was a controversial figure.

But I’m talking about him today, because he’s the person that coined the phrase global village, the title of the sermon. Amazingly, McLuhan came up with this idea 30 years before the world wide web was ever invented. And he described a global village that would one day be made possible by a flow and freedom of information that was shockingly similar to what you and I know as the internet.

McLuhan’s major concept was that the medium is the message. That is to say, the technology used to convey information is more impactful than the information itself. In Oral traditions, stories are told over and over again, passed down through families and clans. The effect is an enrichment of human relationships and kinship. McLuhan believed that the creation of the printing press created a society that was geared toward mechanization, and sameness. Books could be printed, but a limited number of them. There existed a great ability to spread information, but that information came through centralized places, printing presses.
But the Global Village would change all that. With what McLuhan predicted as a technologically based “expansion of consciousness”, what we know as the internet, information would flow freely from one individual to another. The global village would be a vast web of involved relationship where people were compelled to care about a wider sphere of concerns. Also, diversity of opinion would flourish as the ability to generate media became accessible to the masses. Welcome to the blogosphere. It’s a lovely picture of mutual respect and freedom that he painted. But it remains to be seen if the internet and the proliferation of digital technology will serve to unite this village, or be just another platform for competition and strife.

But this question of getting long is with technogy is much older than even McLuhan. In fact it’s a challenge as old as civilization. I want to talk a little bit about the reading that we did earlier in the worship service. No doubt these words are familiar to most, if not all of you. It’s beautiful language, probably made most popular to modern American by the way Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King used the words in many of his speeches.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into prunninghooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more;

But they shall all sit under their own vines and fig trees,
And no one shall make them afraid.

Beyond using the words to inspire, I wanted to look a little deeper at the way they are used in the Bible. This passage that is so often quoted, was actually written as a poem. We often don’t realize it because of translation, but many passages, especially in the old testament are actually poems. They are recitations of pieces of oral tradition from even earlier times.

And we know that this particular poem was passed down to the author of Micah, because the same thing is written, almost word for word in the book of Isaiah. Two completely different writers of different times used this powerful poem to describe a time of peace. No wonder we call on it often today when we talk of peace. It was already a commonly used statement back then.
The swords into plowshares bit is wonderful. It is about conserving a highly valuable commodity of metal, to convert weapons into agricultural tools. It’s a nice concept. Food, not bombs. We don’t think about it often, but this poem isn’t far from what McLuhen was talking about. It is about how to wield the technology of the day for the best purposes, to kill or to feed people. Metal was a precious and limited resource. I could be used for a variety of things, for live giving things, or for death dealing things.

Did you know that the exact opposite concept is used in another passage of the Old Testament? Joel 4:10 says :
Proclaim this among the nations: 
Prepare war, 
stir up the warriors. 
Let all the soldiers draw near, 
let them come up. 
Beat your plowshares into swords, 
and your pruning hooks into spears; 
let the weakling say, "I am a warrior."

Yikes! I guess in ancient times, there wasn’t a great consensus about how technology should be used either.

I mentioned earlier that this poem is found both in Micah, and in Isaiah. But, there is a big different between the two. Mica continues with the poem where Isaiah leaves off. Micah continues in a critical statement about what happens when these nations turn their spears into pruning hooks.

“but they shall all sit under their own vines
and under their own fig trees, 
and no one shall make them afraid;”  repeat

This little passage, is the key to the global community that we seek as Unitarian Universalists. This is the challenge for us, as we aim to embrace wider and wider concepts of human community. We want to know and understand others, and feel a sense of similarity and common humanity. But they shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.
In the midst of that good intention and common humanity, we must recognize that peoples of the world are radically different. Lifestyles vary beyond belief, as do religious traditions, political structures, cultural norms, art, and history.

If we as Unitarian Universalists are going to embrace the idea of global community then we must remember not only to celebrate our sameness, but also to honor our differences. This is a bigger challenge for us than you might think.

Universalism has a somewhat precarious relationship with celebrating difference in a genuine way. In it’s very basic understanding, Universalism is about universal salvation. It’s a belief that a loving God would never condemn people to hell, especially in a arbitrary way like predestination. Today, that doesn’t sound like such a radical belief. But in the 1700s it was big news. In the peak of fire and brimstone preaching, Jonathan Edwards style, Universalists held a radically different view. And they wanted to share it.

We forget that Universalism was an evangelical tradition. That’s right. They wanted desperately to share their good news with the world. John Murray, father of Universalism in America was a powerful preacher. More importantly, he inspired a whole cadre or young preachers who would travel the countryside with the new message.
In addition to impassioned ministers preaching in person, they spread Universalism via publications. They published 182 periodicals in the early 1800s. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these publications was their names. The Gospel Advocate, The Gospel Banner, The Gospel Foundation, The Universalist Trumpet, The Southern Pioneer, The Southern Evangelist, The Western Evangelist, Light of Zion, Genius of Truth, The Herald of Life, The Herald of Gospel Liberty, The Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, and the Evangelical Universalist. To name a few.
American Universalism was an evangelical tradition. Our forbearers were convinced that they knew the truth, and the way, and they were destined to share it with the world. …We certainly don’t know any Unitarian Universalists who think they know THE truth these days, do we.

The Universalism that was all about salvation was evangelical. That message took a twist in later years from universal salvation to a Universal religion. It’s a pretty natural progression if you think about it. If God wouldn’t condemn anyone to Hell, and if people believed a whole huge variety of different things, then it would only follow that each of those traditions had some meaningful insight into the divine.
After the second World War, A group of new young ministers made it their mission to transform Universalism into a religion for all.
A group of new ministers, known as the Humiliati. (Their name, taken from that of an ancient Italian order, means “the humble ones”” made the expansion of Universalism their mission. They committed to the renewal of their denomination with a new message of Universalism for the current time.
They adopted the symbol of the off-center cross, enclosed by a circle. The cross was off-center, and in the new Universalism, Christianity would be off center. It would remain present in Universalist thought, but it was time to make room, to make a Universal religion that called on all faiths and philosophies availability to humanity. The circle represented the all-embracing nature of Universalism; the off-center cross recognized Universalism’s Christian roots while at the same time implying that Christianity was no longer central to the faith.”
The dream was big, a Universal religion for everyone. One church that would embody all faith. One religious voice to speak to the world. They thought that their vision might save a fractured world. Today there are around 200,000 Unitarian Universalists in the United States. Which is about the same number of Unitarians and Universalists that there were in the 1950s when this crusade began. Needless to say, the dream of one church for all people did not pan out. Thank God!
Maybe we can’t be all things to all people. I am fine with that. While we do have a tremendous religious tradition, I am tremendously glad the the attempt at a Universal religion did no succeed. There are some perfectly good religions out there and we don’t need everyone to be a part of ours.
I wanted to talk about this history of Universalism to point out that overreaching our message, is sort of in our DNA as a religion, at least the Universalist side. Being aware of that tendency, and fighting the urge is a big part of being good neighbors in the Global Village.
“But they shall all sit under their own vines and fig trees,” As a country, as a religious tradition, we may have something great to offer the world. We can force that on others, or we can see the global village as an opportunity to learn from others.

Today’s sermon topic came up, not to commemorate Marshal McLuhan’s birthday. That was just a magical coincidence. It came up because one of our principles as UUs is that will “affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” As far as I can tell, the first part of that goal is a forgone conclusion. We are rapidly moving toward a world community. Human beings experience a breadth of connection never before imagined. It’s true that people in the developing world without access to the internet don’t experience the same type of connections. Still their economies are interwoven with the fabric of the wider world. And more and more digital technologies are penetrating into even the most remote villages.

The global village is an emerging reality. The question is, will we turn our swords into plowshares, or our plowshares into swords. Will we as the most powerful nation in the world, encourage the use of technology for learning from others, or forcing them to believe the way we do, for agriculture or for weapons? Will we feed the body and the spirit of our neighbors in the village or will we kill them?

-Amen-

Sermon - "Experiencing the Mystery"

2011-07-18T15:11:00.001-07:00

Experiencing the Mystery

The title of today’s worship service is a little odd, I know. But, It’s the best way I could summarize the first in the list of sources of Unitarian Universalism. That list is in the gray hymnals and on that the back of the order of service. Along with the seven principles that we talk a lot about, there are six sources that are the building blocks of our religious tradition. This particular source is, and I quote:

“Direct experience of the transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

I did my best calling it, “Experiencing the Mystery.” It is listed as the first of our six sources. But I also think it is first source or our religious lives as individuals. Our first source of inspiration, our first source of wonder, or spirituality, our fist and most important source of our religious life is what we experience for ourselves.

On rare and intimate occasions I have heard some of our members share those moments of inspiration, when they felt connected to something greater. One of our leaders has had that experience of connection in the California Redwoods. As he began to grasp their tremendous size and history, he began to place himself in a much broader web of life, a web that reaches further than he had ever really grasped. Another of our members talks about reconnecting with the source of life every time she drives down from her home at the top of the world. Every time she sees the vast expanse of ocean she is reconnected to the earth and reminded what a splendid world we live in.

A lot of us experience that sense of awe and wonder in the midst of nature. I know I do. But there are other sources as well. She’d probably shoot me if she knew I was including this in a sermon, but the conductor of the community choir sometimes waxes poetic about her experience leading a choir. She talks about the rare and beautiful experience of making music as one body of people. The alignment of harmony and consciousness as a choir melds into one voice, and one heart. It’s an amazing experience.

And it’s not unlike what we try to create at the community drum circle. Yes, part of it is getting together and meeting new people. But the drumming, when it comes together right, when everyone in the circle plugs into the rhythm and lets go of their own personal agenda or self consciousness, time stands still. You can totally lose yourself in the depth of connection and the moment.

Direct experience of the transcending mystery is listed as the first source of Unitarian Universalism as a religious tradition. As Unitarian Universalists, we celebrate that ever person, every single person has the capacity to experience what is holy and true. Every person can through prayer, through inspiration, or through their own personal reflection come to know and feel the sacred life-affirming power that we share.
That may not seem like such a big deal to you or me today, but it’s actually quite significant in terms of a religious tradition.
The first source of our faith is not a sacred Text, or tradition. It’s not the word of others. The first source of our faith is an individual’s direct experience of the transcending mystery and wonder that touches each of our lives. It is available to each and every person, from the time we are quite small. It’s not limited by gender, class, age, race, education, language, sexual orientation, nation or origin. It is the mystery and wonder that touches every human being at some point in our lives, the power that moves us. That spark that is available to all, is first and foremost the source of Unitarian Universalism as a religious tradition.

And so it should be. Because that spark of awe and wonder is also the first source of our own individual religions lives. I use religious here and throughout this sermon not to talk about a personal relationship with God. But religious in a broader sense. Religious in the sense of relating to our highest values and deepest understandings of our world.
Experience of the transcending mystery and wonder is the first spark for our religious lives. The experience of human compassion or awe at nature, or the miracle of life, is the bedrock upon which we build our faith. It happens before we read about religion or are taught about it. It certainly happens before any rational argument can be made to us about the existence or non-existence of God, or the nature of the divine. I think children understand these feelings much better than we do as adults. Because it’s about feeling something beyond words, feeling something that’s not been labeled and dissected and processed and trapped by our critical minds.

The sad truth is, religious traditions, including our own sometimes, can do a very good job of extinguishing that spark. More and more I hear my pears, and just about everyone young than us, describing themselves as spiritual but not religious. They know that on occasion that have felt a deeper stirring, a connection to the world around them that goes beyond explanation. They have had that direct experience.
They have also had the mind-numbing experience of boring churches, dry lectures about ancient books, dull music, money sucking institutions, and dim dank spaces that would depress even the happiest of people. There’s something wise about this spiritual but not religious movement. These people seem to be protecting that spark within them. They are protecting their experience of the transcending mystery and wonder from the words and baggage that might diminish it.

By its very nature, the type of experience we are talking about is far beyond what words can capture. Which obviously makes it a little odd to talk about in a sermon. It is a little bit like giving a long lecture on the beauty of music, without ever actually listening to music. These moments of inspiration, like music, far exceed what words can express.
Maybe that’s why we are uncomfortable talking about it, because we feel like we don’t have the right words. I don’t know if you have noticed this, but we UU’s are very , very reluctant to talk about our own personal experiences spirituality. We’ll talk all day about political opinions, or who should do what to make our world a better place. But talking about the experiences that mold our hearts, is a whole different ballgame.
Maybe we don’t feel like we have the right words to adequately explain those moments of mystery. But it’s my hunch that something else holds us back. I think we don’t talk about our experiences because we don’t want to be vulnerable. We don’t want to be considered unscientific, or overly emotional, or overly religious. It’s true. We are worried that if we talk about feelings of spiritual connectedness, or overwhelming beauty, that we would appear, frankly stupid.

Today, I’m asking us together to let down some of those walls, to open ourselves to sharing some of those stories. If you can’t share your own, just start by listening to others with an open mind. I know it is asking a lot, but it could change our lives as a community.

You may know that I went to a liberal Christian seminary, not unlike Claremont School of Theology just up the road. In seminary it broke my heart to hear my Christian class mates say that they would never be able to preach the cutting edge information we learned about the Bible. We learned all sorts of fascinating stuff about Christian history and the way the Bible was put together. Things that both enriched and transformed the common understandings of Christian teaching. They knew if the spoke freely about the historical detail of Christianity, if they told the truth that rested in their mind, they would lose their jobs or cause havoch in their churches. It was a very sad thing to hear then.
Today it breaks my heart to hear UU ministers who can’t talk freely about faith and spirituality, for fear of the exact some thing. Because they fear if they told the truth that rested in their soul, they would lose their jobs or cause havoch in their congregations. I want to test that fear today, and prove it wrong.

For me, the experience of the transcending mystery and wonder first came as a child. Although I am still moved today by the beauty of nature, as I child it was simply breathtaking. I was fortunate to grow up in a family where outdoor adventure was a standard part of our lives. We backpacked every year in the rocky mountains. We camped locally. We scuba dived. For me growing up being outdoors was expected. As I think back on it, there was never a particular stated value to these activities. We weren’t doing it to be fit, or to save the environment. It was just understood that outdoors in nature was the place to be.
I guess it’s no wonder then that my earliest, and still my deepest connection to the wonder of life is through the natural world. In a general way I feel connected to life when in nature. But beyond that, there are a few moments of profound connection. They are moments I will never forget. One was watching the sunset, and the stars appear in the mountains in New Mexico. I had been out backpacking for ten days with a group of Boy Scouts. Needless to say it was a ruckous bunch. But our last night out on the trail I managed to spend some time alone, walking by myself, I decided to sit, and wait and watch. The night sky that came alive before my eyes filled my soul. It opened for me the beauty of possibility in infinite space. It was a breathtaking moment that I knew I would cherish forever.
Years later, in seminary I had a similar experience. I was camping in the hill country outside of Austin Texas. I went down to a shaded stream area to do some reading. Whatever I was reading didn’t last long. I found myself setting aside the notes on theology to sit in nature. And there in the shade next to a stream something stirred in my soul. A sense of connection to the earth was absolutely overwhelming. Frankly it was almost erotic. I sat there, and I simply felt connected, and held by the universe. Again, I knew it was a very simple moment that I would cherish forever.

For me, there have been a couple of amazing, aha moments. The rest of the time, I just try to be open to them. You might call it a spiritual practice, but there’s nothing resembling discipline about it.
To tap into a sense of connection to the Universe I pray. Not because I think God necessarily hears my prayers, like Santa or something. But I pray because it gives me some familiar way of being in relationship with a much broader much more complex life-affirming force that I believe in. It’s like having a conversation with the interdependent web of being.
I pray and I visit the ocean twice a day, nearly every day. Watching the waves churn the water I see, I feel the circulation and respiration of the earth. I feel the source that makes life possible, that makes life beautiful. I visit the ocean twice nearly every day and I am grateful to be alive and to be a part of this magnificent world.

If experiencing the mystery is our first source of faith, if it is the bedrock of our tradition as I believe it is, then we have a lot of work to do in getting that foundation beneath us. We have a lot of work to do in naming what is sacred, in reaching back to that time, that moment when we knew a deeper connection. We have a lot of talking to do.
Only you can share what is sacred for you. Only you can explain what you came to see in a glimmer of hope. No one can do that for you. Hopefully I started a conversation. This is your invitation. Hopefully you will jump in the deep end of the pool with me and tell someone a story of when you felt something stir in your soul.
Amen!

The Value of Democracy

2011-07-05T13:05:00.001-07:00

The Value of Democracy

This weekend and the fourth of July marks a pretty big celebration around here. I know I’m planning to have a few friends over to go to the beach and Barbeque. We pause every year on the 4th of July to commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate our country in all of its uniqueness. That’s just about an affinity for red white and blue. It’s about celebrating our county as a democracy.

Democracy, especially as we use the word isn’t so much about a particular form of government as it is about and ideal. Of course we know the word comes from Greek: (dēmokratía) "rule of the people". In its simplest form, a government in which all the people participate equally in making decisions. It is a lovely concept, and it’s one that we don’t practice. Having that type of equal participating in making community decisions is lovely for a group of about fifty people. But, with over 310 million people that we have in the United States, making decisions is a little more complicated.

When we talk about democracy as something we celebrate or hold dear we’re not talking just about a form of government, we’re talking about something much broader. This reality came to light for me in college. As a political science major, I took a class called “Democracies and Democratization.” We looked at what’s the best way to describe and rank democracies around the world, and what are the things that lead countries toward being more democratic. What I got out of it was, well, that it’s not as black and white as my grade school civics class taught. In fact there’s a whole lot of grey.
Beyond a government where the people vote on occasion, there’s not much agreement on exactly what makes a democracy. What about equitable distribution of wealth, access to education, peaceful turnover of government, freedom of speech, free markets, having the word “democracy” in the name of the country, freedom of religion?

I found a couple of pictures for you to make this point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electoral_democracies.png This first picture is a map created by Freedom House. The countries designated in blue here are electoral democracies. This is the black and white picture, or blue and white as the case may be. There are few surprises here.

A more interesting map comes from a think tank through “The Economist.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Democracy_Index_2010.png This map ranks how democratic different countries are. We see the palest blue countries get a higher score (with Norway being the most democratic country, while the darker blue countries scoring lower, with North Korea being the least democratic.

When we talk about democracy, especially when we celebrate it, we are talking more about an ideal than a simple governmental structure. We are talking about the ideal of a society where people are treated equitably and each person has an opportunity to make their concerns heard. It’s an ideal, and like any ideal, it’s not black and white. Not something that you suddenly are or are not. Democracy is something that we strive for. It’s something that takes a degree of vigilance, as we constantly yearn for a more perfect community, with more equality, more justice.

-CUE IMAGE CHANGE-

Democracy is sort of like faith that way. It involves a sense of longing for something more. People don’t often talk about faith this way because it sounds a little negative. But, there is an aspect to faith that is a yearning, a longing that is never quite fulfilled. I guess it’s about having hope, in a better world, or in God, or personal growth.
What is it you long for in your faith? What are you seeking? Is it personal relationship with God? Is it human connectedness that you seek? Maybe you long to have the mystical experiences of awe and wonder that come in a flash of insight. Do you long to heal and connect with the Earth, the source of us all? There has to be something that you’re longing for, or you wouldn’t be here. Perhaps worst of all, without longing for something better you wouldn’t have much hope. Faith is hoping, it is longing for something better.

And that longing can be tiresome. Sometimes that personal moment of transcendence and enlightenment that you long for, just never happens. Sometimes you’re disappointed by the people you see around you, and your hope in humanity withers a bit. Maintaining a longing for our ideals can be exhausting. It requires a certain level of vigilance. Not in the sense of being overzealous, but in the sense of patiently waiting, holding vigil through the night, waiting for the morning, waiting for a better day to arrive. Our faith takes a certain amount of vigilance to sustain, and so does democracy.

Just as our faith is both a sense of longing and a sense of comfort, so it is with the value of democracy. As July 4th roles around, I’m confident that we can be both grateful for the democracy that we enjoy, at the same time as we seek even more justice and fairness in our country. We can be both grateful and seeking at a better democracy at the same time.

Patriotism is a touchy subject with Unitarian Universalists. Many of us are deeply concerned about the state of civil liberties in the United States and our nation’s propensity for war. I admit those are valid concerns. But, we also have to put those concerns into context. We are incredibly blessed to live our lives with a functional democracy.

Remember the map that I showed earlier. The United States is a pretty pale shade of blue. Not the palest, but we’re doing pretty well. I have one more map to show you to make this point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Democracy_Index_2010_green_and_red.svg This is similar to the comparison of democracies that we say earlier. The Democracy Index measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. The darkest green is the most democratic, while the darkest red is the least. Again, we score near the top, as a “full” democracy. What’s important about that is only about 12% of the world’s population falls within that category. Only 12% of human beings enjoy the freedom that you and I hold dear, the freedom that we celebrate on the 4th of July. Compare that to 36.5% of the population who live under totally authoritarian regimes. I think it’s essential that we keep a sense of perspective. Yes, there is room for us to improve as a democratic country. But let’s not forget how fortunate we are.

I also hear a good deal about how our rights are being chipped away and how our country used to have more integrity in its political system. Any time you hear about the good old days, it is important to ask the question, good for whom?

You know our Constitution, that great hallmark of liberty and democracy came into being only after it’s writers compromised to allow slavery to continue. It took eighty one years, until 1868 with the 14th Amendment that Blacks were considered citizens and granted the right to vote. And women, that’s half the population maybe a little bit more, women were not allowed to vote until 1920. That’s not so long ago. In fact, that is living history for some of the members of this congregation.

To claim that American democracy has fallen from some idyllic past is a gross oversimplification of our history. I find it ironic that both the political right and the political left lay claim to the good old day’s of American democracy, when things were fair and the people controlled the government. That just simply isn’t true.

This history of our country isn’t so different from the history of most. It is a history of government trying to do it’s best. It’s a history of those people with power exerting that power over others, until they resist, until they leverage the power of a constitutional democracy to claim what is rightfully theirs: freedom and equality.

The history of democracy in the United States is a history of oppression and resistance to that oppression. It is a history of people paying a tremendous price to defend democracy. I don’t mean defending democracy against communism, or terrorism, or immigrants, or any other trumped up fear.
The history of democracy in the United States is a history of people resisting oppression. It’s a history of saints and prophets standing up to the crush of wealth and power to say no. You will not take away my dignity as a human being. You will not take away my voice or my rights.

Democracy is the fruit of vigilance. It is a gift that we inherit and a burden we carry as citizens of the United States. But democracy is more than an important political system. It’s important to understand here in our religious home that it’s not just an efficient and effective form of government. Democracy is a reflection of our values as Americans and especially as Unitarian Universalists.

Democracy is interwoven with our faith in profound ways. It’s a theological stance almost. As UU’s we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We believe that people, when given the tools and opportunity will choose what is best for them, and best for their fellow human beings. We believe that individuals, citizens, are oriented toward the good, and if they have the freedom to do so, they will follow that good for themselves and for the community they live in.

We also believe that people are at their best when they gather in community. That’s why we have churches, or at least that’s why I am involved in church. Because of a deep, deep conviction that you and I and everyone we know are better people when we live in relationship. That’s what our faith tradition is built on. And democracy, as a political system requires a relationship among its citizenry. It requires that people come together in the public square to discuss, to trust, to make decisions, and ultimately to build a sense of relationship. It is an inherently community building form of government.

There’s a saying that I think really sums up Unitarian Universalism and the way we build community. I’ve heard it a few times, and I’ve said it to you many more. Don’t come to church to find the people you love. Come to church love the people you find. We are not here to be a club of people who are exactly alike. We are here to build a community in our diversity. We are here as unique, sometimes quirky, sometimes difficult people. And we come and build this community together as a spiritual discipline. That’s right, building community is a spiritual discipline. Don’t come to church to find the people you love. Come to church love the people you find. And although that’s sort of a pithy way of describing what we aspire to be, isn’t the same true of democracy.

Democracy isn’t about supporting only the people you are like you. Unfortunately the pathetic dialog that makes up most of partisan politics would have you believe that. “Vote for me, because I’m like you and we’re better than those people.” Bleh! That’s not democracy, that’s grade-school recess. Democracy, like church, is about creating a country where anyone can thrive. It’s not just about sticking up for your own interest. It’s about protecting the interest of those who may not have as much power. Democracy, like church, is about creating a place where every individual can thrive, and benefit from full participation in a wider community.

Democracy takes vigilance, it takes work. If you have been around UUFLB for long, and certainly if you have served on our Board, you know that building the community is work. In fact it’s a little easier to grasp in our little community. Just like our country, we are a complex living community, striving to do our best. Trying to do our best. The work will never be done, because there will always be people to care for, hymns to sing, babies to greet, conflicts to resolve, spirits to renew, children to teach. There will always be work. That’s just what it takes to keep a community going. And it is tremendous work.

On this July 3rd, let us be vigilant. Let us stand vigil in hopeful expectation and preparation for more justice. Let us be vigilant in our faith, celebrating the comfort of the sacred, and always yearning for a better world.
Let us be vigilant this weekend, let us celebrate the struggle that is democracy. Because that struggle, that journey is a holy one.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Humanism: A Matter of Perspective"

2011-06-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

Humanism: A Matter of Perspective

This morning we are talking about Humanism as one of the sources of Unitarian Universalism. The word Humanism used to be used a lot more than it is today. That may be in part because we’re not sure exactly what it means. Some of us know that it’s sort of like atheism, but it’s not really the same thing. Other than that, for the most part we aren’t very sure. But humanism has had, and continues to have a huge impact on us as a religious tradition. In fact, next to Christianity, humanism probably influences Unitarian Universalism more than any other source. We just don’t know it, because we take many of it’s ideas for granted.

When you talk about humanism outside of religious circles, people usually think about the Italian Renaissance of the 14th century. Before that time the vast majority of art had been religious. It was either funded by the church, or depicted sacred subjects. But, in 14th Century Italy artists and intellectuals began to look elsewhere for inspiration. Rather than turning to Christianity, writers and artists turned to the Classical themes of Greece and Rome. The Renaissance was a re-birth of Classical thought. More than a new artistic expression, this shift away from the church inspired a tremendous intellectual advance that embraced all of life’s experiences, not just the religious.
Along with the transformation in art, scholars began to downplayed the importance of religious doctrine. They encouraged the use of reason in understanding the Bible. They understood the ethical teachings of Jesus to be more important than the miracles surrounding his story. And they became focused less on the rewards of an afterlife and more on making the best of this life. It’s pretty UU stuff, I’d say. That historical moment of 14th Century Italy was the root of humanism.

But Humanism as we use the word within Unitarian Universalist circles came to its full force in the 20th Century. There was a defining moment in 1933. After the conclusion of World War I a sense of human possibility was in the air. Between scholars and theologians, the humanist ideals of equality, scientific achievement, and human dignity were at an all-time high. Eventually a group came together and to try and summarize what it was that these modern day Humanists were getting at. So in 1933 they published the Humanist Manifest. Sixty-five prominent thinkers were asked to sign the document. Over half of them were Unitarians, and half of the Unitarians were clergy. From that moment to this moment, Humanism has been a strong and clear movement within Unitarianism.
That manifesto was the foundation for Humanism as we know it today. It’s a pretty lengthy document including aspirations for human relationship, and of war and inequality, statements about religion and science. What I want to talk about today are the three major ways that Humanism came to shape Unitarian Universalism of today.

Perhaps more than anything, humanists believe in the ability of science to describe the world around us. Both hard sciences and social sciences have supplied humanity with unprecedented understanding of the Universe. No longer are humans beholden to mythical explanations for natural events. No longer do we derive our ethics from theological speculation. Through reason and experimentation we have the means to search for the answers ourselves.
Humanists believed, we believe that it is irresponsible to dismiss the findings of science in our religious lives. What is true in a house of worship must reflect the truth of the classroom and the laboratory. What is true of your faith must also be true of your mind. Humanists believe, and we believe that science and reason cannot be ignored in church. In fact, they can be embraced and they can deepen our sense of meaning.

While the Humanists of 1933 pushed new limits, saying that science essentially trumped theology, they came to that understanding as a natural outgrowth of the Unitarian tradition. Remember Unitarians didn’t become a separate tradition in America primarily because they rejected the Trinity. They became a new religion because they insisted on using reason to understand ethics and history to understand the Bible.

William Ellery Channing and the early Unitarians said, hold up. We humans have something special, a special ability to use our intellect and our compassion to become better people. And becoming better people should be the focus of religious life. Religious liberals risked everything to argue that we use reason in our religion. We were intelligent beings, not robots. We are called to use our minds to come up with the best understanding of our world.
Then, as now, much of this debate revolved around the Bible. While Channing and other early Unitarians began to see the book as a text created in a certain historical context, with meaning for that context, the Christian orthodoxy would have no part of it. To them the Bible stood on its own merits, apart from history or science. It was the word of God.
I want to read to you a brief quote of what Channing had to say about the Bible in 1819. “We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible… its style nowhere affects the precision of science, or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense, than that of our own age and country, and consequently demanding more continual exercise of judgment.”

As he shaped Unitarianism as a new American religion, it was clear to Channing that we must use reason to interpret religion. What he started was carried deeper by the humanists of the 20th century and today.

Because humanists are so invested in science, it should surprise is that they take issue with those aspects of religion that seem to happen outside of the laws of nature, the “Supernatural.” Humanists oppose supernatural expressions of religion. They reject the idea of miracles happening outside of the laws of nature and science. That is the second major contribution of Humanists then and now.

At first glance, this rejection of miracles is pretty simple. We UUs typically don’t buy into the miracle stories of the Bible, or of other religions sacred texts for that matter. Be they ancient stories of virgin births, or contemporary stories of faith healings, we are a bit skeptical. We don’t embrace the supernatural. The flip side of that is that we do embrace the natural. While we reject the supernatural miracles of religious myth, we embrace the miracles of the grandeur of nature, the miracle of human compassion, the miracle of life. You see the Humanist stance on supernaturalism isn’t just a rejection of fairytales. It’s also a deep and fulfilling embrace of an earthier spirituality.

My favorite passage on the way we understand miracles comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a sermon to a graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, where he had been a student, Emerson said, “the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” (Wright, Three Prophets, p. 97)
I am especially fond of the way that Emerson deals with miracles because he tells us why we should not accept them. Our lives are full of beauty every day, in nature and the compassion of people around us, the blowing clover and the falling rain. Why then, should we build a faith on the supposed miracles of generations past.
In one of his most famous pieces of writing, Nature, Emerson wrote, “Why shouldn’t we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why shouldn’t we have a poetry of insight and not of traditions, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?” (Albanese, Spirituality, P. 46) For Emerson and the theologians that he inspired, life was full of sacred and holy moments. There was no reason to rely on mythical miracles of the past. In fact dwelling on those stories only degraded our own awareness of what is truly sacred.

The final, and most important contribution of humanism was a new perspective for role or religion within human life. Humanism brought new perspective to religious life, it brought new and much needed perspective to Unitarian Universalism.
I said earlier that Humanism is a bit like atheism. But they are not exactly the same thing. Atheists believe that there is no God, that science and the laws of physics are the only way of understanding our life experience. It’s a pretty clear and simple statement of belief.
Humanists, on the other hand believe that God is not necessary for a meaningful life. They don’t explicitly say that God does not exist. Humanists argue that we humans have enough going on with reason and ethics and artistic expression to have a rich and meaningful life, without speculating about supernatural beings. They don’t argue against the existence of God; they just don’t think God is necessary or all that helpful.

But the really fascinating twist is that Humanists embrace religion itself. They believe that religion with all of its ritual and culture is a tool that humans create to make meaning out of their lives. Religion builds community, it shares history, it builds an ethical atmosphere, it organizes to help care for those in need. We know this, it is the story of our Fellowship. Religion does a lot of wonderful things, all without God. Religion has a tremendous capacity to contribute meaning to people’s lives. And religion is a product of our innate moral values, the truths that we are able to discern through reason and emotional depth.
What humanism brings to liberal religion is a sense of perspective. People create religion to make meaning out of their lives. Often times that is good and helpful. But the key is that people create religion, not the other way around. Religion is helpful, meaningful, and true only to the extent that it enriches people’s lives. Religion exists for people. Not the other way around.

The easiest way to understand Humanism might be to understand humans at the center of things. Just like Copernicus discovered the heliocentric solar system. It was revolutionary when he realize that the sun was at the center, not the earth. It totally transformed the way we understood our place in the world.
Well in religious life, the humanist twist is just as revolutionary. Humanists believe that the worth and dignity of every person is of supreme importance. It should be the central concern when we gather in community, not speculation about God, or adherence to outdated myths.

I hope you can see a bit now why I said that Humanism influences Unitarian Universalism more than any other tradition, with the exception maybe of Christianity. It has demanded that we take science seriously as a religious tradition. Humanism guided us toward embracing the wonder of the natural world as a source of inspiration and spirituality. And humanism upholds the inherent worth and dignity of every person above religious speculation or traditions. It has deeply shaped who we are.

Unitarian Universalists hold a great variety of beliefs about God, and humanity. We are about as theologically diverse as a religious community can get. That diversity often leads to the assumption that you can believe whatever you want and be a Unitarian Universalist. But it’s not quite that simple.

You cannot believe whatever you want and be a Unitarian Universalist. Because, we expect you to have integrity with your beliefs. I don’t mean that you have to write a complete systematic theology. You don’t have to have it all figured out. What you do have to do is integrate your mind with your faith.

Sound theology, meaningful theology has only two criteria. It must make sense, and it must make a difference. You have heard me say this before. It wasn’t until this week until I realized how much that grows out of Humanism. That’s it, it must make sense, and it must make a difference.

You can’t leave reason and science in a totally separate compartment of your life. These two truths have to come together, to reconcile somehow in your heart and in your head. What you believe should make sense to you. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should make sense.
And your belief should make a difference. Your belief should inspire you to be a better person in the world. Because this world, this life is the one we are certain of. This is the one that matters. Let your religion be a well to draw from, not a trap that ensnares in the past.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Respecting the Web"

2011-06-20T13:16:00.001-07:00

Respecting the Web

Often when we talk about the web that connects us, one to the other, I’m reminded of a wonderful Buddhist image. It’s Indra’s net. I’m reminded of Indra’s Net for first, because obviously a net and a web are only slightly different things. But much more importantly, I love the way that Indra’s net describes so beautifully what we call the web of life or the interconnected web of all existence. I found this quote that describes Indra’s web beautifully.

“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring”
(Francis Harold Cook describes the metaphor of Indra's net from the perspective of the Huayan school in the book Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra)

Isn’t that beautiful. The Buddhist interpretation of this metaphor is quite different from what you or I might first suggest. Buddhists understand the infinite nature of the web to talk about the insignificance of self. Each of us is merely a reflection of the world around us. Like a reflective jewel, our very essence is a composition of other things. We are nothing more than a combination of physical parts, the ideas in our hear, or the cultural way we express ourselves. We are a composite reflection of everything else, not a unique and separate entity. Quite simply, Buddhists see the net as a metaphor to say, “Get over yourself.” To live a meaningful life is to get over self-obsession, and accept that we are products of the world around us. We are a jewel, a beautiful jewel reflecting all the other infinite jewels in the net. And once we do get over ourselves, we are inspired to help others.

That’s probably not what you first thought of when you heard this reading though. As Unitarian Universalists, our interpretation of the web is quite different. We start with the belief that every person has inherent worth and dignity, and that we are endowed with bodies and particular skills to change the world; we start from a focus on the way we can impact the world, rather than the goal of getting over ourselves. It’s worth pointing out that wherever we start from, as Buddhists or as Unitarian Universalists, Indra’s net teaches us that the religious life is about considering and caring for others.

There is one more take on the Net, or the web. It’s the undersatanding that we usually suggest when we talk about the Interdependent web of all existence as our Seventh Principle. That is the truth, the fundamental truth that we depend on one another to live. As living beings we eat breath and live in relationship with the natural world. Other lives make our life possible. Both the world of science and the world of religion have pointed to this fact of life. We are in fact jewels that reflect the infinite other jewels in the net. We have together on the interconnected web.

I wanted to bring up all of these various interpretations of Indra’s Net because there are just as many interpretations of our Seventh principle. For some it’s about the spiritual truth of interconnectedness. For others is about acting to help out because we’re all in this together. And still for others it can be a source of humility, and recognizing our place in the web. As our responsive reading said, We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it.

Sometime’s it’s easy to respect the web. Sometimes we feel connected and motivated to do that little extra to help the environment. But for me, it gets a little overwhelming. Perhaps it is a generational thing. But my head has been crammed with so many messages about how devastated our planet is, it’s hard to feel like what I do matters. I haven’t even bothered to bring you the latest scientific information on global warming. But you know as well as I do, it’s bad, worse than we thought.

The scale of the problem just seems to swallow the impact of my efforts. How does my choice to recycle this paper, or take a five minute walk rather than fire up my care make a difference? How can I make a difference in such a tremendous global problem?

Perhaps more than anything today, I want this sermon to be a remind that our actions are also like a web. Every choice that we make reaches out across space and time to affect the world in a multitude of ways. I know that sounds dramatic but it’s true. Every time we choose to recycle, or walk, or eat a plant-based diet, or turn off the lights, our action is reflected in countless ways across space.

I’ve been focusing quite a bit in my daily life on the broader impact of my decisions. It’s as simple as the the question “Is this who I want to be in the world.” Do I want to be the kind of person who recycles, or the kind of person who doesn’t care. Do I want to be the kind of person who finds some greener way to get from A to B, or do I want to pollute more? I have been trying a lot lately to ask the question, “is this the type of person I want to be,” rather than the question, “is this what I want to do.” In the moment, in a tired disconnected moment I often frankly want to do the thing that is fastest and most comfortable. But that doesn’t usually lead to being the type of person I want to be.

That question actually sums up a whole field of ethics called virtue ethics. I don’t want to go into it in detail, but basically the idea is that the ethical choice isn’t just about what you do in this moment. It is about the type of character you build, because you’re like to act that way again, and again, and again. So the impact of your choice today is likely to be repeated over and over in the future.

Our actions as like a web. They spread out across time as we learn to make the same choice over and over. One recycled can, one reuse-able grocery bag, one vegetarian dinner becomes many more as we cultivate habits of helping the earth. Our choices do make a difference in this global challenge. Each individual choice to respect the web spreads out far and wide.

Sometimes making the right choice casts an array of benefits far beyond what we first intended. It touches people and places we never knew about. It spreads across tremendous distance to make a difference. The best example I can think of in this was is eating organic foods.
You all have heard that eating organic foods is better. Some of us do it, some of us think it’s silly and expensive. But think with me for just a minute about the broad consequences of making the choice to eat organic. At the simplest level that we are all aware of, eating organic foods means that you aren’t exposing your body to pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones that are in many of our foods. Eating what nature produces is healthier than eating what comes out of a science lab. That seems reasonable.
But eating organic has other benefits that you may not be as aware of. Those chemicals that you want to avoid eating are also bad for the environment. So when we buy foods that have been grown without them, we save not only ourselves from those chemicals, we also reduce the use of petro chemicals, oil production, water pollution through run-off and soil erosion. So when we keep those chemicals out of our own diet, they are not spread in mass quantities over soil. So we keep those chemicals out of our bodies as well as out of the ecological system we all depend on.
But there’s more. Eating organic actually helps the diversity and health of our food sources. You see the foods that are grown for commercial production are selected and bred for maximum production with the help of chemicals. They aren’t the crops that are the heartiest or most drought resistant. They aren’t the crops that have the best natural defenses against disease or insects. They are the crops that grow the fastest and the biggest, with the help of chemicals. The vase majority of food produced in the United States comes from an alarmingly small number of genetically modified breads of plants and animals. But, by choosing foods that don’t rely on chemicals to grow, we encourage healthy strains of food sources, we help nature to do its job of creating a beautiful bounty of resources, without a chemicals or genetic tinkering.
And there’s more. Eating organic means that you save the people who grow and process our foods from being exposed to the harmful pesticides and chemical fertilizers used in conventional farming. Far from the bucolic image of American Gothic, or Norman Rockwell paintings, conventional farming is a massive industry with tremendous risks to workers, not the least of which is the harmful chemicals that saturate their work place. Keeping those chemicals off our plate also keeps farm workers out of harm’s way.

I’m sure a real environmental wiz or foodie could tell you more benefits of eating organic foods. That’s just the little bit that I know of. This is not meant to be an ad for organic foods. Yes, that is one way of respecting the web. But more importantly, it is an example of how our choices tug on a string of the web. One choice can have multiple layers of impact. Tugging on one thread of the web can have a very, very broad impact for the better. In the face of global climate melt down, we absolutely must remember that our individual actions reach out in ways we may never have known to help build better, stronger web of life.

I want to leave you all with a short story of hope. It’s a story that has touched me tremendously because I see it every day. Those of you who are one facebook may remember a few months ago how delighted I was to see so many marine mammals at main beach. There were dolphins and sea lions. I was thrilled.
But the really thrilling news is that they have stuck around. You may have noticed this yourself. The number of dolphins off our coast has skyrocketed. And I finally found out why.
It’s because of kelp. But not just any kelp. It’s because of giant kelp forests that have been restored. This is kelp that people helped to grow, with the explicit goal of repairing the marine habitat off our coast. And it has worked beautifully. I love seeing dolphins at the beach when I walk my dog there. They are amazing creatures. And there presence is even more magical for me now, when I realize that those beautiful graceful mammals are there, because a handful of committed people cared enough to grow kelp, which fed sea urchins, which fed fish which feed dolphins.
Some people are turning the world around literally. They are restoring species, and reinvigorating nature to its glory. There’s too much work to assume that you can’t make a difference. There’s too much need to set this one out.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Pride and the Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person"

2011-06-06T13:22:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed our rainbow flag was outside this morning. It’s been hiding in the back corner of the sanctuary for over a year. It’s nice to have in here, but I’m glad to tell you that the flag is coming out. It’s going to be out on the patio on Sundays now. The only reason it hasn’t been out there is that that slightest breeze would blow the thing over. You see that plastic base that it sits in was empty so it had no support. So just a couple of weeks ago, Brian figured out how to fill the base with some heavy clay to give it some weight.

And that’s exactly what I aim to do with today’s worship service, to give some weight to the idea of Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride. Because whether you know it or not, it’s about more than a parade or a picnic or a rainbow flag. Pride is about a community, struggling for survival, standing up for its rights, standing up to proclaim that they too are human beings with dignity and worth.
Most of us know of the Gay Pride Parade as a fun day, with colorful floats and costumes. There are amazing parties going on all month, it is non-stop dancing in the street. But, the Gay Pride Parade, is more than just a party. Every year in June, pride parades mark the anniversary of one very important night, forty three years ago. That night, June 28, 1968, at a gay bar in New York City, for the first time the queer community fought back, literally.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, gay bars in New York and SanFrancisco were regularly raided by the police. Once a month, police would come to take names and pictures of customers, arrest anyone in inappropriate clothing, meaning clothing of the wrong gender. And they would confiscate all the liquor and close the bar.

This particular night, around 1:30 in the morning, the gay bar call Stonewall Inn was full of people when the police began their raid. But things did not go as expected. From the very outset of the raid, there was a new level of tension. First all the male patrons were lined up and asked for identification. Meanwhile, customers dressed as women were taken to the restroom and ordered to prove their gender to a police officer present. For the first time, they began to resist the humiliation, for the first time some of them said no.

Later, outside the bar when the police were arresting a butch lesbian who was struggling, she was knocked in the head with a billy club. She yelled out to the crowd of hundreds, “Why don’t you do something?” The police threw her in the back of the wagon, and the crowd became a mob. … Years, decades, of humiliation and police brutality would be confronted that night. A series of nights of chaos in the Greenwich Village neighborhood where the bar stood became known as the Stonewall Riots, the seminal moment for the modern Gay Rights movement. Within weeks, two major organizations were formed, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, organizations that continue on today under different names.

The next year, 1970, the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots was clebrated by marches in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Those marches became what we know of as, the Gay Pride Parade. Then, and now, there is a purpose to pride. It is not just a party, it is an anniversary to one of the most important moments of LGBT history, a moment of saying NO to humiliation and police brutality.

One important piece of this history, a piece that is often forgotten is that the moment that the Gay Pride Parade commemorates, the Stonewall riots, was not a well organized political event. It was not popular or comfortable. It was not funded by a national organization. It was not lead by wealthy white men. Quite the contrary, the beginning of the gay rights movement, the Stonewall rebellion, was the result of some fierce drag queens and butch lesbians. Those people most marginalized, were the ones with the guts to say, we’re not going to take this anymore. So as we pause to remember gay pride, we must also pause to remember the lesbian and transgender folks. Without them, who knows how long it would have taken to stand up. If pride is all about celebrating who we are, we must remember all of who we are, all of the brave men and women, the fierce drag queens, the butch lesbians, the sissies who were the first to say NO, to the humiliation.

Fortunately times have changed a bit. Gay bars are no longer raided by the police, at least not that I know of. And the Gay rights movement has moved far beyond using violence to get its message across. It is a well-funded and organized political movement, chugging along on the track to equality. But they still march every year, and not just in those three cities where it started. Gay Pride parades occur in every state, in pretty much every reasonably sized city.
In fact we will participate with other UU congregations in the Orange County Pride picnic in August. It’s a great time.
But why? Why have pride in 2011 some might ask? Why fly this silly rainbow flag here in Laguna Beach? The answer is, because it’s still necessary. Still today many, many people who would rather LGBT movement disappear. Many , many people think that everyone should be heterosexual, and if they are unable or unwilling to do so, they simply shouldn’t have the same rights. As long as that is the case, as long as some people try silence or hide our queer brothers and sisters, then Pride will be necessary. Because it’s not just about a party. It’s about pausing to celebrate progress and make the world pay attention, whether it wants to or not.

I debated about brining this up, but I can’t let it pass by. Not this week. I think it is too important for you to know. Last month, Laguna Presbyterian Church made the bold move to publicly stand in opposition to it’s national body. Last month, Laguna Presbyterian Church made a clear and public statement that it stands in opposition to allowing faithful gay and lesbian individuals into ordained ministry.

The largest and most prominent church in our town feels compelled to publicly declare that faithful gay and lesbian people are not fit for ordained ministry in their church.

This is why we have a pride flag out front, and will continue to fly it. Because as a religious community, we have a specially calling to celebrate the inherent worth and dignity of EVERY person.

I feel deeply for the members of Laguna Presbyterian Church who have lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family members and friends. Perhaps most of all I feel for the young queer people growing up in that church, young people who should be finding a source of comfort in their faith, not condemnation. Many of you in this room have felt the pain of not fitting the mold of a religious tradition.

We celebrate LGBT Pride in the month of June because it is still necessary to stand up and say everyone has inherent worth and dignity, including our Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender brothers and sister. Everyone, every single person has inherent worth and dignity.

All this Summer we are going to focus on the Seven Principles and Six Sources of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Today, I’m especially concerned about the first Principle. You can read it on the back of your order of service or on the poster on the back wall of the sanctuary, or in any Unitarian Universalist church across the country. “We the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

If you’re a member here, you have no doubt heard this bit about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It’s a pretty strong and important theological statement. The inherent worth and dignity of every person. But you may not be as familiar with the introductory language. We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote.

You see the seven principles is often misunderstood as a list of things that we as individual UUs believe in. While the Principles do help point in that direction, that’s not what the document is about. The Seven Principles is a covenant between congregations. It is a public commitment, sort of like a mission statement. It is a commitment to affirm and promote these concepts that we hold dear, and to do so as a community. “We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

We don’t just believe people are good. That’s just the very beginning, the very surface layer of this statement. Don’t get me wrong, we do, I do believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. But also, we believe it is our job as a religious community to affirm, to call out, to bear witness to that goodness. And it is our job to promote it. It is our job to create a community and a world where people can grow into their best selves, where inherent worth and dignity of every person can blossom into its full glory.

I’m occasionally asked about our message of love and tolerance. This support for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, does that mean that anyone can say or do what they want and we support them in it? Do we support unjust behaviors or things that break down community? The answer is no, we do not.

As Unitarian Universalists our faith calls to love and acceptance, not to being doormats. While we do believe that people are inherently good, we also recognize the crucial religious work of building community. Every person has inherent worth and dignity, not a right to act irresponsibly or hurtfully. Every person has inherent worth and dignity, not a right to be destructive to others.

That’s why it is important that we embrace the full statement of our first principles, and all of our principles for that matter. Our principles are only meaningful when are analyze them, challenge them, give them context and depth. Otherwise they are nothing more than a poster on the wall. It’s not about reading them, it’s about living them in our real complex lives. It’s not just a list of the things that we believe about the world, but a list of the ways in which we will act toward creating a better world. Unitarian Universalism is a religion of action, not belief. One of the actions that we hold most dear is creating a world where people are safe to flourish into their fully beautiful selves. Sometimes creating that world, where everyone is safe to flourish means saying “no” to destructive people and to intolerance.

The song that we are about to sing as our closing song is called “We are a Gentle Angry People.” It was written in 1978 to be performed at the memorial for Harvey Milk. Thanks to the recent film about his life, many more of us know his story. Harvey Milk was a fiery politician who was the first openly gay man elected to public office. After serving for just 11 months Milk was assassinated, along with the mayor by a disgruntled former City Council Member.
His assassination left an entire community devastated. It was bad enough that Harvey Milk the man had died. But that bullet also struck the heart of an entire community’s hopes and dreams. In that moment of deep, deep loss, this song was written. “We are a gentle angry people, and we are singing for our lives.”

This song was written by and for the Gay and lesbian community in their struggle. But I think it speaks to us as Unitarain Universalists and as human beings. There is reason to be angry when our inherent worth and dignity is challenged by the world. But that’s not something that happened with one shot in 1978. It’s not something that happens only to the LGBT community.
It’s something that happens to every single one of us. Each and every one of us feels the affect of being ignored, being told we are somehow less than. Whether because of the way we look, the way we talk, how old we are, who we love, how much money we make. Each one of us has at one time or another had our dignity challenged.
So as we sing this closing hymn together, I want you to join me, in celebration of gay pride, and in affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Let us sing for our lives, and the lives of others.

-Amen-

sermon - "Models of Mercy"

2011-05-22T16:56:00.001-07:00

Models of Mercy
All this month we have been talking about mercy from different UU angles. This Sunday I thought I thought it would be nice to cast a wider net on the topic, to explore some of the variety of ways different traditions celebrate the value of mercy.
To start out with, it’s helpful to get on the same page of what mercy is. We’ve talked about it a bit, saying that it takes a variety of forms as we care for one another with the tools that we have, and mercy starts with understanding and accepting a person where they are in their life. But before we dive into other religious traditions, I thought it would help to look at a secular definition.

According to the dictionary, Mercy is compassionate treatment of or attitude towards an offender or adversary, who is in one's power or care. Another definition describes mercy as the discretionary power of a judge to pardon someone or to mitigate punishment.

There is an element of power in mercy that we haven’t really talked about yet. It’s not just about being compassionate, it’s about exercising one’s power over another person in a compassionate way. And that’s just the way that most religious traditions talk about it.

I chose this morning’s hymn, “Amazing Grace” because it speaks so robustly about the type of mercy that Christianity embodies. The core of Christian theology is the idea of salvation from sin by the sacrifice and teachings of Jesus Christ. It’s all about God having mercy for humans. Christianity is about mercy.
Admittedly, it’s a little difficult for some of us to see the mercy in such a set up. The sin, damnation, and judgment doesn’t quite fit with our understanding of the world or ourselves. Most of us don’t accept the premise of original sin or eternal damnation.
But what if we did. Pause with me for a minute to explore a different world view. If in fact we were all sinners in the very core of our being, if in fact that would necessarily condemn us to Hell FOREVER. If in fact God gave his beloved son, Jesus to suffer a terrible death of torture to pay the price for our sins, Then that would be just about the most merciful thing in the world.
This is the great thing about looking at different religions. You don’t have to accept ever detail of the theology to be able to embrace the values that it represents. The core story of salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is a story of mercy. The very mechanics of Christian theology hinge on the mercy of God.
And mercy arises in Christianity in another important way, a way that might be more accessible to us as Unitarian Universalists. Throughout his ministry, Jesus lived as a model of mercy. Encounter after encounter he spoke about and lived this value. I think the most prominent moment of mercy involves throwing stones. You all know this story.

John 8:1-11
1But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Jesus taught about mercy. He taught that none of us are perfect, and our mutual imperfections, our brokenness, must lead us to mercy on one another. Whether with tax collectors, adulterers, the diseased or disenfranchised, Jesus sat at their side as a model of mercy.

But Jesus was not the only model of mercy. Islam is a religion of submission to the one true god, Allah. In fact Muslim loosely translated means one who submits. We shouldn’t be surprised that one of the key aspects within the faith is mercy. And like in Christianity, the value of mercy is both embedded in the actual theology of the faith, as well as exemplified in it’s rich stories.
We know that the Holy Quran is the sacred text of Muslims. It reads somewhat differently from the Christian Bible, in that it is not a continuous story of a people. Rather the Quran is composed of distinct and separate chapters.
Each chapter except for one begins with one phrase, the same phrase. You have probably heard this before if you have heard any readings of the Quran or any Muslims reciting prayer. Each chapter of the Quran opens with basmala, in English it is the phrase, “In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” It’s worth keeping in mind that not only is the Quran a sacred text, it is also considered by many to be a book of legal code for Muslim society. We are familiar with sharia, or Muslim law and the way it has been portrayed in the West. Let us remember the next time we hear a description of sharia, that every single chapter, every single law is introduced with the phrase, “In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.”

One of the other pieces of Muslim life that is often familiar to us is the practice of prayer. Muslims pray five times each day. These aren’t extemporaneous prayers like you or I might think of, the Hey, God, how’s it going. Thanks for xyz, and by the way, I could use some help with this or that issue. No. When Muslims pray, it is a recitation of particular passages of the Quran. It is prescribed that they pray five times each day. This means each worshipper repeats the attribute of mercy in the phrase “in the name of Allay, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” sixty-eight times each day. That’s a whole lot of mercy.

I said that the Quran is not a story or collection of stories. But, there is another source of stories in the tradition. Hadith are stories that are given great importance within Islam as the tradition is learned and laws are interpreted. According to a Hadith, the Prophet Mohammed told this story.

"A man was traveling along a road when he was very thirsty. He found a well, so he went down into it to drink. As he came up he found a gasping dog that was apparently so thirsty to the extent that he licked the dust. The man thought, 'this dog is now as thirsty as I was a short while ago'. Therefore, he went down the well again and filled his shoe with water. Holding it in his mouth, he came up and gave the water to the dog to drink. Allah rewarded him for his action by forgiving him.
“The Prophet’s audience asked: "Messenger of Allah, are we to be rewarded for kindness to animals?"
He answered: "You get a reward for every kindness you do to any living creature."

If you have ever been to my house, you have met my amazing beautiful, and quite nearly perfect dog, Lucy. I love dogs, but I didn’t write this story. Every story comes out of a particular context. It’s important to understand how Muslims, particularly in this timeframe felt about dogs. Muslims generally cast dogs in a negative light because of their ritual impurity, like pork. Some say Muhammad explicitly did not like dogs, and that angels do not enter a household that has a dog. Still today most practicing Muslims do not have dogs as pets. They are only kept for work, work, such as guarding the house or farm, or when used for hunting purposes.

This charming story from the lips of Muhammed encourages follows to show mercy to all creatures, even the most lowly and dirty ones. “The man thought, 'this dog is now as thirsty as I was a short while ago'. Therefore, he went down the well again and filled his shoe with water. Holding it in his mouth, he came up and gave the water to the dog to drink.” What a lovely story of mercy.

Before we come back to our own tradition, I want to look at one more. Buddhism is actually the first example that came to my mind on this topic. You have heard me speak a great deal about the role of compassion in Buddhism. That’s at the core of Buddhism as the Buddha originally shared it.
The Buddha’s teachings are not really theological, but practical, a lifestyle to ending the constant sense of longing in our lives. The Buddha taught people how to end their suffering by becoming more enlightened. And anyone can become a Buddha, anyone can become enlightened with the enough practice and mindfulness.
Or, one can become a Bodhisattva. Loosely translated, a Bodhisattva is a person who has achieved enlightenment, but who has not yet enjoyed Nirvana. Remember in Buddhism, the goal, Nirvana is basically an elimination of the self and all it’s karmic baggage. Nirvana is an end of one’s existence. So a bodhisattva is an enlightened being who focuses his or her energy on sharing enlightenment with other people. In much of Buddhist theology, it is thought nobler to become a bodhisattva, than to reach Nirvana. It’s better to reach enlightenment and stick around to share that knowledge with others, than it is to achieve Nirvana and essential check out from this world.
The best metaphore I can think of is the oxygen masks on airplanes. You know how they tell you, if you are traveling with a child or other person who needs assistance, you should first secure your own oxygen mask before helping those around you. Well Buddhism takes the opposite view. Once a being has achieved enlightenment, it’s best to help others to achieve enlightenment before you enjoy Nirvana yourself.
That certainly speaks to the kind of mercy we heard described earlier, using one’s position of power to show kindness and compassion to others. The bodhisattva then becomes the model of mercy within Buddhism. The bodhisattva is one who forsakes his or her own perfected state to help others out.

As we wrap up our month of mercy, I want to take a moment to address the place of mercy in our own religious tradition, in Unitarian Universalism.

The long and deep history of Unitarianism and Universalism is occasionally summed up by one witty saying. It is said that Universalists believed that God was too good to condemn them to Hell, and Unitarians believed that they were too good to be condemned by God. That’s what separated them from the rest of Christians. In a very, very small nutshell, that’s the history of these traditions.

We still largely hold true to those beliefs. The first our of seven principles is about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Rather than embracing the idea of original sin, we believe the people are inherently good. And, although we have some variety of belief about the existence of God, as a religious tradition we tend to agree that the Universe we live in is a beautiful, wonderful magnificent place. And the creative force that is responsible for it, be it evolution, God, or something in between is pretty darn amazing. God, or what have you, is good.
We’re good; God is good. Well I don’t know about you, but I’m glad we’re all good. I’m glad we wrapped that little problem up. It’s all good, You and me and God and life, good, good, good.

Please excuse my sarcasm. I do believe that people are inherently good and that the world we inhabit is amazing. But there’s more to it than that. In the real world, some people make mistakes. And it’s no secret that some people have more power than others. Power to change lives.
But sometimes we’re afraid to talk about those realities. In a perfect world, mercy isn’t necessary because no one needs it. Perhaps that’s why mercy isn’t found anywhere in Seven Principles of the UUA. There is “compassion”, and “equality”, and “justice.” But mercy never comes up. I think we would do well to add mercy to the list. Of course that would require being honest that some people have power over others. It would require admitting that sometimes we make mistakes and need to be forgiven.
As a religious tradition, we still need mercy in our theology. Whether it is bringing water to lowly thirsty dog, or recognizing our own flaws match the flaws of others. Whether it is in the form of a committed spiritual teacher, for our tradition to be all it can be, we need to make room to think about, manifest mercy.

-Amen-

Sermon - "When Bootstraps are Broken"

2011-05-16T09:58:00.001-07:00

“When Bootstraps are Broken”
I want to start in an unusual way. I want to share with you the obituary that was written not long ago. This is about a person who many of the Laguna Beach residents knew well. But you don’t have to have known him personally to understand this description of a man troubled by addiction and homelessness. The obituary says:

“There were two cowboys on the streets of Laguna. One – the laughing, joking, talkative guy. The other- the lonely, sad, unsteady, elderly man. We knew them both.
We loved them both-most of the time, and this week we cried for both and we prayed for both because Charles Reginald Conwell III has died a sudden and violent death surrounded by lights, vehicles, and people in uniform.
Cowboy was part of such action many times, but not this finish-death. But our Cowboy will live on, in the hearts of us all- his long time friends. Goodbye for now, Cowboy, til we meet again, joyfully- in that better place.”

-Author Unknown-

Like I said, many of the members of this congregation knew cowboy well. He was a bit of a local character. I have to admit that I only knew him from the beach. But this obituary sort of says it all. “There were two cowboys on the streets of Laguna. One – the laughing, joking, talkative guy. The other- the lonely, sad, unsteady, elderly man. We knew them both.

This is not a unique story of homelessness. Many people without the wherewithal to maintain regular housing have two sides, a whole side, a whole person of inherent worth and dignity. A human being that is easy to love, whose stories you or I could relate to in an instant. And they also have a broken side. Often involving addiction or mental illness, this brokenness is a scary but real flip side of life. This is the side that scares many of us away.

There were two cowboys, One – the laughing, joking, talkative guy. The other- the lonely, sad, unsteady, elderly man. There were two cowboys, one broken, and one whole. His story isn’t unique to the homeless community, and his story isn’t unique to the human community. His brokenness was just a little more difficult for the world to know how to deal with.

Just like Cowboy, you and I and everyone we know, we are also both broken and whole. We are loveable beings of inherent worth and dignity, with fundamental and permanent flaws. We are broken and whole.

Both fundamentally broken and whole at the same time. It is a paradox, two different realities, existing at the same time. Neither one more important or more true, both broken and whole. It is that precarious paradox that rests deeply in religious life. This is a core of my understanding of the world, and my understanding of my brothers and sisters. In the midst of the miracles and the mayhem. In the undulations between the mightiest love and the most terrifying hate, rests all people. Each and every one of us is broken and whole, just like this chalice.

This broken and whole chalice is one of the most important symbols from my own religious life. It serves as an anchor to challenging questions like homelessness and mercy.
This chalice is not a chalice of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, at least it wasn’t originally. This broken and whole chalice is from a Christian community, where they use one like this every week to serve communion.
That church is called Community of Hope. It started in the late 90s as a United Methodist mission to care for people living with AIDS. A very dedicated minister, a mentor of mine actually, along with five other families, some gay and some straight, began to worship together.
Their mission was to serve those most marginalized by society. They fed the homeless regularly. They taught GED courses to inmates. They traveled to Guatemala to help build houses. They provided housing for low-income families. And they dove into the HIV/AIDS crises, head on. At one point, this congregation conducted an average of two funerals a month for people who died of AIDS.
They knew deeply the reality of brokenness in the world, but they also knew that in the midst of that brokenness, each person who walked through their doors, each person that they served was whole. Each person was sacred. At their very first worship service together, the chalice like this one became their primary symbol, a chalice that is both broken and whole. And that chalice has become a symbol of my own life and my own theology. It’s the way that I understand the complexity of humanity. Like our first of the Seven UU Principles talks about, every person has inherent worth and dignity. Every person has inherent worth and dignity. But it is also true that every person, in some area of their life is broken with feelings of hurt, anger, loss, inadequacy, disabilities, addictions or a slew of other challenges. We are both broken and whole.

Laguna Beach Homeless Situation

There were two cowboys, One – the laughing, joking, talkative guy. The other- the lonely, sad, unsteady, elderly man. This dual reality is more than a theological concept. It’s part of who we are and how we live our lives. It’s a reality that we haven’t quite caught up with in our efforts to care for the homeless here in Laguna Beach, or in the country for that matter.
The usual model for reaching out to the homeless is what you might call the “teach a person to fish” model. We all know the proverb. Give a person a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a person to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Nearly every conversation about homelessness revolves around this idea that homeless people need a respite, some job training, and they’ll be back to working full time and on their own.
For many people that’s true. But for a large portion of the homeless population, the challenge is much, much deeper than updating your job skills. For many people, the way in which they are broken, makes it impossible for them to pull their lives together, at least within the opportunities that our society provides. Sometimes teaching a person to fish isn’t enough.

A respected organization, the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that Twenty-three percent of homeless people are chronically homeless. A person who is "chronically homeless" is a homeless individual with a disabling condition like substance abuse, serious mental illness, developmental disability, or chronic physical illness. They have either been continuously homeless for a year or more, or had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.

Twenty-three percent of the homeless population isn’t going to be learning to fish any time soon. They are broken in ways that make it impossible to organize their lives in a stable way. This is the part of the story that few want to tell. Sometimes teaching people to fish isn’t enough. Sometimes people, like cowboy, are not able, and most likely will not be able to make ends meet in our society.

If we are to take homelessness seriously, then we need to take into account the needs of that community. There are many people who will tell you that the homeless in our city need a place to stay for a few nights, and they need some job skills and they will be on their way. These are the same people who are willing to invest a little bit of money to provide temporary shelter to the homeless, as a step toward sending them on their way. This is the approach that the city has taken thus far.

But there is another approach that is on the rise in Laguna Beach. Friendship Shelter is developing a plan to provide 40 long-term housing units, studio apartments, for people who would otherwise be chronically homeless. A part of that shelter would be a small temporary shelter, where people can stay for a short time in crisis. But the main thrust, is providing long-term stable housing for those most in need. In addition to the housing, the facility would provide mental health resources, a social worker, and other necessary services. This project is still in developmental stages. We have seen blueprints at the Interfaith Council meeting and funding sources are being explored. Hopefully we can bring more news about developments to UUFLB soon.

You see having mercy is more complicated that teaching people how to help themselves. In a universe where everyone is born equal, where everyone is able bodied and of right mind, that would make sense. But mercy demands more of us. Mercy demands that we meet people where they are, in both their wholeness and their brokenness. Mercy demands more than a fishing lesson.

Strangely enough, this isn’t a sermon isn’t really about homelessness. This is a sermon on mercy and helping people where they are. All this month we are talking about mercy here at UUFLB. We talked about caring for our loved ones through the aging process, and we talked about the tremendous variety of ways that mothers show their love.

But this week, I want us to see that mercy is first about meeting someone where they are. Mercy is about taking someone in all of their wholeness, and all of their brokenness to offer what you can to help. I don’t mean that we have to give up on the possibility that someone can change, or that they might one day overcome their challenges. But, to really show mercy, to really help anyone in a compassionate way, we have to first start where they are, not with some cleaned up version of who they could be or should be.

We often think of mercy as sweetness and kindness, and that is true to some extent. But there’s more to it than that. Mercy is a strangely brave thing. It takes tremendous courage to accept the painful reality of some people’s situation. Any one of us can write a check or sign a letter to help the world. Anyone can do a political analysis of the social ills of our time, or write a few emails. But I think that mercy is something different. Mercy takes much more courage. It’s courage that is rare.

I sometimes find glimmers of it in myself, but they are fleeting. It’s just so much easier to not listen to the real challenges that someone faces, the real brokenness that rests inside. But that’s what mercy is. It’s having the courage to face both the brokenness and the wholeness of someone, and to offer help that respects both of these realities.
Mercy isn’t just helping a person. It’s helping a person as they are. It’s helping a real person with all their complexities, all their baggage. Mercy demands more of us.

In closing, I want to remind you of the hymn that we sang as today’s meditation. Voice still and small

Voice still and small,
deep inside all,
I hear you call, singing.
In storm and rain,
sorrow and pain,
still we’ll remain singing.
Calming my fears,
quenching my tears,
through all the years, singing

In our religious lives, or maybe you want to call it spiritual or philosophical. In our deeper lives, we celebrate that still small voice from within. It is our conscience, and it is often a source of comfort. Through storm and rain, sorrow and pain, still we’ll remain, singing.
But there’s more to this little song. It is the recognition that each person, each beautifully whole and broken person possesses their own still small voice. And that voice deep within us, that voice of passion and freedom and concern, that still small voice is in each of us, resonates with the voice within our brothers and sisters.
As we endeavor to share our mercy with the world, to meet people where they are in all their glory and their despair, let us remember that their wholeness matches ours, and their brokenness does as well. Let us remember that mercy means meeting people where they are.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Thanks Mom"

2011-05-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Mom

“Thanks, Mom.” I’ve said these words countless times. For clean clothes for a meals, for sage advice, for encouraging words, a good laugh or silent company. “Thanks, Mom.” I imagine I’m not the only one with this phrase seared into their brain, like automatic response. I’m sure many of you have said it frequently, and some of you hear it, a lot.
It’s bit like the mantra of my childhood or of my relationship with my mother. “Thanks, Mom.” I have said it so many times, and will probably say it until the day I day. But there’s only one problem with mantras. When you say something enough times, it can lose it’s meaning. Hail Mary full of grace… Our father who art in heaven… when you say something enough times, the words lose their meaning. Rather than a sentence or phrase, you find you are simply repeating a set of sounds in order.
So rather than another “Thanks, Mom.” Maybe we can spend some time today talking about what it is we are thankful for, and what we can learn from all the different kinds of mothers who have shown us support through out lives.

Mother’s Day can get a pretty bad wrap these days. It is one of the most commercial holidays around. According to the New York Times, American’s are projected to spend $1.9 Billion on flowers for mothers day this year. That’s a whole lot of flowers.

But it’s worth remembering that Mother’s Day actually has a remarkable history. The holiday is rooted in on Unitarian woman’s personal campaign to end war. In 1870 Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day proclamation. Although we have read it in years past, I want to share these powerful words with you again.

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:

"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.

"We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.

Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

This holiday was serious business for Julia Ward Howe. It was a deeply sincere and political point. For her, the experience of being a mother led to intense political action and public debate.

She saw some of the worst effects of the Revolutionary War -- not only the death and disease which killed and maimed the soldiers. She also worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war. She saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war, the restructuring of the economies of both North and South. All of this set Julia Ward Howe on a mission to bring together the voices of women to end the blight of war.

In addition to her public struggle for women’s rights and against war, Howe was a deeply committed abolitionist. She was ridiculed for both causes. Especially painful was the way many White women criticized her abolitionist work, as if she were being disloyal to her sisters by advocating for the rights of Blacks as well.

It’s important that we remember Julia Ward Howe, not just to talk about the roots of this holiday. But, to talk about the way a mother’s love manifests itself in the world in a variety of ways. Howe’s love for her children, and for all people, lead her to be an outspoken political activist. I can’t tell you if she could bake a cake or sing a lullaby, but I know that she did everything in her power to make the world a better place for her children.

Not for lack of effort, eventually the original concept of Mother’s Day faded away. The funds dried up for cities to celebrate the holiday. Her version of Mother’s Day didn’t quite take off, but Julia Ward Howe planted the seed that would later become what we know as Mother’s Day today. Years later, A West Virginia women’s group led by Anna Reeves Jarvis began to celebrate an adaptation of Howe’s holiday. They celebrated to re-unite families and neighbors that had been divided between the Union and Confederate sides of the Civil War. The group held a Mother’s Friendship Day.

When I read about the roots of this holiday, I am struck by the difference between the Hallmark cards today, and those women who boldly engaged in outspoken political action. Julia Ward Howe was not Betty Crocker. Yet we celebrate her as a mother, who did everything within her power to make the world a better place for those that she loved.

The point is, whether it is through political action or chocolate chip cookies, mothers, and all of us show our love in different ways. Today we remember mothers, and all people who have acted out of love to make the world a better place for future generations.

There is a concept that’s very popular in couples counseling these days. It’s the idea of “love languages.” We all express our love in different ways. For some people, the little things are what really count. For other’s it’s all about having a formal commitment that tells the world that you are a couple. Some people need time alone with their partner to feel like their relationship is validated while others feel especially appreciated when they receive gifts.

The idea is that we all feel appreciated in different ways. We all have a love language. It’s a pretty easy concept to get a grasp of in navigating the labyrinth of romantic relationships. The more we know about what makes our partner tick, the better we can show them we appreciate them.

But it occurs to me that the same thing is true for familial love. The ways we are nurtured are different from one person to the next and from one generation to the next. While Julia Ward Howe felt compelled as a mother to be a political activist, other women have felt compelled to create a loving environment at home, or nurture their children’s education, or to bring home the bacon. The ways mothers support their children is a deeply complicated and personal decision. It’s rooted in what they think their family needs, and it’s rooted in their time and culture.

I say it’s a choice, but the truth is that many woman don’t have a choice about how they will mother. The circumstances of women often dictate the “love language” that they have access to. For a very long time some women were prevented from working. The only appropriate avenue to nurture their children was in the home, in domestic ways. They were deeply limited. Ironically, during that same period, another class of women, working class women, had to work six days a week to feed their families. They had no choice but to show their love through making money to make ends meet, often leaving their children home alone.

Maybe, being a mother doesn’t mean being one thing in particular. Maybe, being a mother means having to make some incredibly tough choices about how to express your love. Every mother, every one of them here, and every one of our mothers has found a unique way of expressing her caring. And maybe that’s what Mother’s Day ought to be about. Not idealizing one particular kind of mother, but pausing, so say a collective “Thanks mom,” for making the incredibly hard decision to show your love the way that you did.

There are a million and one ways in which mothers show their love. And although it’s difficult to talk about, sometimes the most caring thing that a mother does, is let go of a child that she know she can’t support. Letting go is one of the unspoken, deeply noble ways that women express their love. Letting go is a choice that we also embrace this Mothers day.

The loving act of letting go is a big part of my own story, and part of the way that I have come to understand Mother’s Day. Many of you know, because I have preached about it a few times in the past, that I was adopted. I was adopted at birth by my amazing family. It something I always knew and felt okay with. It’s just a part of my family’s story. But, starting about three years ago, about the same time that I came to this congregation as your minister, I have been in contact with my biological parents. At first it was about exchanging information, and reassuring them that everything has turned out all right. My family, the family I grew up with, is amazing and I wouldn’t trade them for the world. Being adopted by them has filled my life with as much love and support as anyone could ask for.

But this past year I have come to know my biological parents on a somewhat deeper level. They were high-school sweethearts who couldn’t support a child and weren’t ready to get married yet. In getting to know them better, I have gotten a glimpse of the way their love and support took form through some very tough choices. As I build a deeper relationship with my birth parents, I understand more and more what a painful and loving decision it is to let go. At that time, in that place, the best way to love, the only way to love was to let go, and pray for the best.

Doing the right thing can look radically different for different mothers. Choosing the right thing, the loving thing is a tremendous task. And today we celebrate all mothers, all people who do their best to care for the people they love. Throughout our lives, each one of us, men and women make those difficult choices about the best way to care for our loved ones.

We know the unfortunate uncertainty of that gift. Whether we are mothers or not, we know the struggle of aiming to support another person with what little resources we have. Whether it’s little time, little money, a finite human attention span. Maybe we don’t feel like we have the right words to offer comfort. We are faced with the challenge every day. “Is this the right choice, the right way to be supportive? “

But this Mother’s Day, I want to offer a gift, to mothers and everyone else. The gift is a respite from the worry of doing the right thing. Let’s set that worry aside, and have a little faith in the power of love. There is no guarantee that what we choose is the best way to nurture our children. There’s no guarantee that we will use the right love language every time.
There is no guarantee. But for this mothers day, I want you to join me in a small leap of faith. Join me in a faith that when we give a gift of love, it is eventually received. When we act out of our hearts, it transcends those limitations of not enough time, not enough money. Eventually, in the long view, in the broad picture, when we care for the people in our lives and do it from the heart, it is enough.

This Mother’s Day, let the power of love that resounds in our hearts, sing a louder song of life than the echoes of doubt. This Mother’s Day, let us have faith in the power of love.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Compassionate Companions"

2011-05-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

"Compassionate Companions"

There are certain advantages to being a young minister. And there are some disadvantages as well. One of them being that my life experience does not include many of the things that older people experience and deal with. I just haven’t been down that road yet.
This Sunday we are talking about caring for loved ones through illness and the aging process. This isn’t something that I have a great deal of experience with, certainly not the kind of experience that many of you have. But, it is far too important of a subject for this community to shy away from. Most of you have already had some experience like this. Nearly all of us will at some time in our lives car for another aging person. And I can guarantee that each one of us will be the recipient of this kind of care. So I want to talk a little about how we might do it gracefully.
Like most of my sermons, this isn’t intended to offer that last word on a topic. Quite the opposite, I hope that this worship service serves as a conversation starter, something to mull over and discuss. Because we’re all learning together. There’s no one right or perfect way of being a compassionate companion.

This past week I heard a description of hope that I thought was particularly helpful for our discussion today. It was that hope isn’t something that you have or don’t have. Hope is something that comes into being, sort of like a path across a meadow. It’s something that gets made slowly over time. It takes shape by putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again. Until finally a way is worn, a way that seems like the normal way that anyone would go.

Being a companion on the journey of aging reminds me a lot of this. I’m sure there are stages, moments, when the future is completely uncertain. It’s unclear how you will make it through. But somehow, a path gets made. It seems daunting, impossible maybe at first. But then you find your way. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time as you journey with your companion.

Companion seems to be the best word for this type of caring relationship. Because it’s not just about caring for your spouse. It may be a parent or a grandparent. It may be a good friend. But the relationship is the same. And while we are talking mostly about aging today, often in life this type of long term care is needed for someone impacted by illness at any age. It may be a friend, or even a child that we companion along this journey of uncertainty. It doesn’t matter who the person is that you are caring for. It’s about being present with someone you care about through a change in their life. It’s a bit of a journey that you go on together. Neither one in the lead necessarily, but companions exploring a new territory.

Of course this type of change happens throughout our lives. We move into a new phase. Not to diminish the fear and pain that often accompany aging, but it may help to remember that some of those other transitions are scary as well. Going to school for the first time, going to college, entering the reality of the working world and paying the bills. Lives certainly change when children come along. Talk about daunting. Then there is retirement and aging.
Over and over again in our lives we shift to a different way of being a different reality. We find that there is a new normal, and we adjust to it. Some of those ways of being normal, we never anticipated, and couldn’t have imagined until they become our lives.
A new normal can bring out a person you never expected. A person hiding inside that you never knew existed. The tremendous new normal that came out of nowhere when my grandmother first got sick, was how my older brother suddenly became a caregiver. At the hospital, when everyone else was a wreck, he was able to be there and be calm. When everyone else taking a grim picture of the future, he was able to see through the mess, take one step at a time, and literally make sure everyone was eating and sleeping. While my brother is an amazing father now, this was the first time I had seem anything resembling a care taker in him. As he took charge seemingly out of the blue, I realized for the first time that he would be a great parent. He found a new way of being, a way that none of us expected in that moment.

When my grandmother was debilitated by that stroke, my whole family found a new normal. This was the same grandmother who had been the regular babysitter for my younger cousin and who cared for the older people in the apartment community where she lived.
My how the tables turned over night. After her stroke my grandmother was in a nursing home, a place we all knew she dreaded going. Her life changed, and so did my mom’s. For the next three years, my mother spent two or three hours a day at the nursing home. She was there nearly every day. In an effort to find hope in the situation, she put one foot in front of the other and did what she thought was right for her. This new normal changed her life, and frankly the rest of us had a hard time understanding that. What was normal to her meant a pretty big change for us as well. For the rest of us who only visited occasionally, the idea of spending hours there every day just seamed so strange. Not to mention our mother, my dad wife, has a completely new and defining focus of her life and time.

A good friend of mine is going through a very similar situation with his own parents. His parents are living together and his father is extremely ill. His cancer has consumed their lives and transformed their family home into one giant hospital room. My friend, a dear compassionate person couldn’t handle visiting every day. So he goes every other week, and still doesn’t know how is healthy mother does it.
“It’s like a morgue over there. I don’t know how she can stand it.” He tells me. That’s because he hasn’t been the one there putting one foot in front of the other day after day. Life changes; what we consider normal changes, sometimes into something we never would have recognized as our own life. And for those who are not an immediate part of the change, it can seem sudden and bizarre. But for those in the midst of it, those companions on the journey, finding a new sense of normal is just what happens.
While caring for a loved one can deepen that particular relationship beyond measure, it doesn’t do very good things for the rest of your relationships. It can often lead to major isolation. But I want you to know that you are not alone. Those of you who have been companions through aging and illness, and those of us who will be, you are not alone. Since the beginning of history, humans have done this for one another. It is sacred timeless work. It’s what makes us who we are. While some people may not understand the hours given or the limitless commitment, you are in good company with other companions, who are doing the same thing for the people who are so special in their lives.

I’m reminded of the Buddhist prayer concept of metta. We have done it several times here. It’s a way to stretch and strengthen one’s own compassion. You start by feeling your own experiences of suffering in the world. Knowing they are unpleasant, you feel compassion for yourself. Then reaching out, you see the suffering of those you love. Knowing that their suffering is unpleasant and not a choice, you feel compassion for them. Then more broadly, reaching out with your heart, perhaps to strangers, or to people you particularly have problems with. Recognizing that they too have suffering in their lives, you offer compassion, knowing that no one chooses to suffer. It’s a tremendously helpful spiritual discipline in life. But I point it out because the base of this isn’t being a perfect person with a heart of gold. The base is a very logical step beyond being in touch with your own suffering and difficulty in life. Don’t ignore it. Let it be a tool to better understand your brothers and sisters in need. Let the very real difficulty of the situation be a step toward deepening compassion.

Being a compassionate companion can be isolating. And eventually it can wear you down. But everyone needs some slack. I’m sure that even Mother Theresa has her off days, days of short temper and annoyance. No one is asking caregivers to be super-human, or to be any more than they already are.
These days in my life there are a lot of friends who are first time parents. Just last week for Easter we had a one-year old over for four hours and I thought I was going fall over by the time she left. What I see from these new parents is that they deeply love their children, and they are absolutely exhausted. They are occasionally angry and impatient. And the need their friends to say AMEN, and not judge them as bad parents. Just the same, companions, caregivers have taken on a tremendous commitment that undoubtedly leads to frustration and exhaustion. That’s okay. No one is going to judge you for that. It’s okay to say this is difficult, or I’m tired. Because what you are already doing is heroic.

Probably for most people being a companion through the aging process isn’t a choice. It’s just something that you do, like putting one foot in front of the other. There is no other option. But I want to pause, to say thank you, to those of you who have and who continue to provide long-term care for someone in need. You are heroes. You may not have chosen this path, but somehow it became your new normal. You never aimed to be a rescuer, but here you are. Well whether you chose it or not, I want to say thank you. Caring for our loved one’s is part of the glory of being alive. You are part of the beauty of what it means to be human beings.

In closing, I hope you will join me with a short visualization. It’s nothing difficult. Just join me in your mind’s eye seeing a meadow of tall, thick grass, gently blowing in the breeze on a warm day. In that meadow is a walking path. Not wide, but deep enough that the dirt has been packed down, deep enough that walking it, the way would not be lost.
For those of you who have already worn this path of hope, those compassionate companions, remember when all you had was a field of uncertainty. Remember when you didn’t know how you would possibly do this much caring. We thank you for putting one foot in front of the other, and for sharing with us a path of hope.
For those of us who haven’t had that duty yet, may we remember that step by step, one foot in front of the other is the only way to get there. When our patience is tapped, when we feel lost in the wilderness, let us remember that we journey where others have tread before. And they made it, one step at a time.

Whether we have been there or not, we are all going to need someone to walk gently with us. We will all need the support of compassionate companions at some point in our lives. May a way of hope and grace be found as we walk the journey together.
-Amen-

Sermon - "Letting Go of Longing"

2011-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Letting Go of Longing

This month we are talking about freedom at UUFLB. We heard some about freedom of speech and religious expression with the ACLU. And we talked about how giving financial support can help people free themselves from turmoil after humanitarian crisis. Today we’re going to talk a bit about spiritual freedom.

We often assume that different religions are different ways of understanding God. Like you can just swap out a different name for God and suddenly you’re talking about a different religion. Well it’s not quite that simple. Different religions focus on radically different aspects of life. Buddhism deals very little with God in a way we might use the word. But, it deals a great deal with freedom, or liberating ourselves from suffering. Buddhist life is focused on achieving a sense of freedom. Not the type of freedom that you or I might think of. This isn’t about freedom to do what we please, or economic freedom. This is freedom as a state of mind, freedom from the sources of suffering in our lives.

I have explained the basic principles of Buddhism a few times in worship. But, I think this bares repeating because it is so radically different from the world view that we live in. In fact that’s what draws me to Buddhism most. It offers a direct challenge to achievement culture that America is steeped in.

The foundation of Buddhism comes in the Four Noble Truths. This was the great realization that Buddha had when he reached enlightenment under the Bohdi Tree.
The first Noble Truth is that “life is suffering.” At least that’s the way it is usually translated. Life is suffering. From the time we come into the world we experience pain sickness and death. Even as we enjoy things, there is a knowledge that they are for a limited time or quantity. We are never satisfied, we are always longing for something more or something different.
In fact, a better translation of this First Noble Truth that is “all life is dissatisfaction.” The Buddha wasn’t a complete pessimist, saying that life is just pain and suffering. But the essential experience of life is dissatisfaction. We always want something more or something different from what we have at this moment. We attach ourselves to something other than what we have or what we feel.
Which brings us to the Second Noble Truth. The Second Noble Truth is that the root of suffering, or dissatisfaction as I prefer to call it, is attachment. Life is suffering because of attachment. We get attached to material things that are fleeting. We also get attached to disappointments of the past, or anxieties of the future. We are attached to the way things could have been, or the way we didn’t quite make the mark that one time. We even get absorbed in how wonderful life used to be. We get attached to what is not here and now, and we long for a different experience. And thus we are dissatisfied. So the First Noble Truth is that all life is suffering. The Second Noble Truth is that attachment, or longing is the root cause of that suffering.
The third Noble Truth is the next logical conclusion. Ending this constant attachment is the way to end the state of suffering in one’s life. Suffering ends when craving ends. For that sense of craving to end we must remove the delusion of needing those things in our lives. And when we are able to achieve this freedom from longing and suffering, we enter a liberated state of being, or enlightenment.
But how, you ask, how does one make this great achievement of releasing all that we long for. Well, that’s the Fourth Noble Truth. Reaching this liberated state, or enlightenment can be achieved through the path laid out by the Buddha. Remember the wheel that we looked at earlier with the children. The eight spokes of the wheel are a reminder of the Noble Eight Fold Path. Those are the eight areas that the Buddha suggested focusing on to end our sense of longing and attachment.
I want to name these eight areas of focus, just so we get a sense of what they are and the broad focus of Buddhist life. Right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. We certainly don’t have time to unpack each of these. Obviously there is a lot of ground covered.

As Unitarian Universalists, we tend to buck anytime someone claims to the THE answer, THE way to enlightenment, I know I do.
But Buddhism has an ability to hold this sense of offering an answer in a very gentle way. The teaching of the Buddha is considered useful and true only to the extent that it helps remove suffering in one’s life. This is the point of probably the most famous parable within the tradition.
In this parable, the Buddha compared his own teachings to a raft that could be used to cross a river.
A man is trapped on one side of a fast-flowing river. Where he stands, there is great danger and uncertainty - but on the far side of the river, there is safety. But there is no bridge or ferry for crossing. So the man gathers logs, leaves, twigs, and vines and is able to fashion a raft, sturdy enough to carry him to the other shore. By lying on the raft and using his arms to paddle, he crosses the river to safety.
The Buddha then asks the listeners a question: “What would you think if the man, having crossed over the river, then said to himself, ‘Oh, this raft has served me so well, I should strap it on to my back and carry it over land now?’”
The monks replied that it would not be very sensible to cling to the raft in such a way.
The Buddha continues: “What if he lay the raft down gratefully, thinking that this raft has served him well, but is no longer of use and can thus be laid down upon the shore?”
The monks replied that this would be the proper attitude.
The Buddha concluded by saying, “So it is with my teachings, which are like a raft, and are for crossing over with — not for seizing hold of.”

This is such a gem of religious teaching. It is so important to realize that truth, is not imbedded in a building or in books. The religious institutions are neither holy or perfect. It is a tool, a helpful tool, to be used on the path toward enlightenment.

Buddhsim is a path of freedom. It’s contrary to the assumption that we might have when we think of monks and meditation. It all looks very serious and from the outside. But really the goal of the Buddhist life is to let go. It’s about letting go of all the things that occupy our mind, the regrets, the hopes the fears, all that we cling to and suffer over.

One of the best lessons I have had about letting go was during a yoga class. I have done a little bit of yoga in my life. Every time I do it I think to myself “That was great! I should do that more often.” Then I don’t do it again for another couple of years. But in one particular class I was told something that made a tremendous difference. I remember this class was during the Santa Anna winds one October. Everyone was on edge, and tense. We started the class with a long period of just breathing together, and our teacher explained that doing yoga shouldn’t feel strained. I shouldn’t feel forced, or over-concentrated. In fact just the opposite is true. I should feel open and freeing.

It was fascinating to get such a physical lesson in this concept of Buddhism. Throughout that yoga class, I was able to be aware of my body in a new way. Was I straining, was I forcing this, was I cutting off, constricting? Or was I opening and letting go? I could feel it so acutely in my body. Our minds and our bodies are very similar and so deeply connected. Sometimes, without even realizing it, we can become totally clenched, totally constricted, forced in focusing on one little detail, whether good or bad. But if we pause to take a few deep breaths, we can choose to let go of some of that longing, some of that tension. We can choose to let go, and open up a little bit.

Yoga shouldn’t be an exercise in limitation and constriction. It should make us feel free and open. I think this is also true for much of life in general, including church life. We ask for a lot in our members here at UUFLB, and church can be a wonderful spiritual discipline. Coming to worship every Sunday, making time to volunteer in some way, learning with our children, helping maintain our beautiful facility, all of these take attention and can be seen as a spiritual practice. It is a way to take time to honor what is sacred to you. But, like yoga or meditation or any other spiritual discipline, church should leave us feeling more open and expansive, not forced or restricted. Hopefully you have found a niche to participate that does this for you. If not, if church feels forced or hard, try shifting a little. Lets talk and see if there’s some way it can be an experience of liberation.

Before we close our time together, I want to just make sure we’re on the same page about this “letting go of longing.” What kind of longing are we letting go of? Most obviously, letting go of consumerism and longing to keep up with the Joneses. But today I want us also to consider giving up some of the longing that we may think of as more noble causes. Maybe we long so deeply to be better people in some way. Maybe we long for a specific sort of social or environmental change to occur. Maybe we long to be perfect parents or spouses. Maybe we long make our world a better place in some other way.

Whatever the longing is for, for today, for a moment, I hope that we can take a deep breath and release some of that longing. Realizing there is a choice. If we pause, to breathe, if we can let go long enough to let your heart fill with compassion. Let go of longing for just long enough to accept that you are enough in this very moment. Here and now.

May that moment of satisfaction, the moment of compassion be available to you always.

-Amen-

Sermon - "A Gift Freely Given"

2011-04-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

A Gift Freely Given

We have all heard the proverb, “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” It’s actually an ancient Chinese proverb attributed to Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism in the 4th or 5th Century BC. Interesting that this little gem has held up for so long.

The meaning is pretty clear, sometimes it is more helpful to give a person the skills to help themselves rather than give a quick fix, or what the immediate need is. Today as we are talking about the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, this proverb comes to mind. The UUSC is committed not to providing a quick and easy answer to human suffering. Rather they are committed to the difficult work of uncovering what the source of that suffering is. They go upstream if you will, to discover the source, so that that the problem can be solved, not just mended momentarily.

Giving help isn’t just about giving a hand out to those in need. UUSC understands that giving help can also be an opportunity to empower and liberate those people who are most in need in a society. I initially called this sermon “A Gift Freely Given” because we had a newsletter deadline. A much more apt title for what we are talking about today would be “Giving the Gift of Freedom.” Because that’s what UUSC aims to do. That’s what we aim to do in the vast majority of our charitable giving. We aim to give the gift of freedom, to give tools and resources to help people to help themselves, especially those people who are most neglected around the world.

Many of you know that I was in the Peace Corps in 2001. I was serving in Cote d’Ivoire. Yes, that is the country that has been in the news quite a bit these past few weeks where the UN and French military are trying to unseat an illegitimate president. Because of the political unrest, I was only in the country for nine months, rather than the usual 27 months of service.

It was an amazing time of my life. People usually ask what I did there, and I explain that I was in the water and sanitation program. Our goal was to develop the clean drinking water in villages and to do education about sanitation issues. But that’s not what I really did. What I really did was walk around the village. Every day. I walked and walked. I met with elders and traditional leaders. I went to people’s fields. I went to the health clinic. I went to the market. For six months I walked around the village meeting people. There were no building projects, there was only learning and building relationships. Just as we were beginning to talk about building some latrines, that’s when the political situation became a mess and we were evacuated.

Of course people want to know what I did, how I helped people. And it’s much easier to tell them that I was there working on water and sanitation issues. But the truth is, I didn’t have time to do that sort of work, because it took six months to get to know the people in my village of only a few hundred people. It took six months to lay the groundwork for any meaningful help.

One of the things that we talked a lot about, one of the things that we tried to prevent was “cadeaux mentality,” or “gift mentality.” That’s the idea that helping is a matter of giving a gift, and walking away. Whether it’s the gift of a water well, a new school building, or a health clinic, we saw over and over again communities asked for, and Westerners were eager to give these quick solutions. No matter if there were no mechanics to fix that fancy well when it broke down, or if there was money to pay teachers at the school, or supplies for the medical clinic. We saw the run-down remnants of quick fixes that were just not the right answer. I think my favorite example of this was a bicycle powered water pump, in a region where it was unheard of for women to ride a bicycle, so it sat there, and rusted.

Maybe it’s human nature to want instant gratification. On both ends, the giver and the receiver want to make a difference, and make it fast. Well, what I learned probably more than anything in my time with the Peace Corps, is that real difference NEVER comes quickly. There is NO quick fix, no materially gift that can help a community overnight.

The alternative, and the type of work that UUSC is committed to is a much more imbedded type of aid. We know that concept of imbedded journalism, where they are on the ground and interviewing people in the thick of it. Well what we’re talking about today is imbedded giving.

One way that UUSC tries to do that is through working with social structures that already exist on the ground. They may be aid organizations, they may be collectives of women, they may be religious organizations. Like in Japan, the UUSC is seeking to help those most in need by channeling its support through Buddhist congregations, who presumably know exactly where and what kind of help is needed. And occasionally, when there’s no organization in a community to work with, the UUSC will call interested parties together, just to talk about their challenges. And they talk, and talk, and talk, until those people begin to understand themselves as a group of problem solvers.

They almost always partner with an organization made up of those who are in need. It’s the best way, perhaps the only way to be sure that the help goes where it is needed.

The UUSC calls their way of providing aid the eye-to-eye partnership model. It’s about partnering in a way that’s not paternalistic. It’s about building real relationships and learning from one another. The keys that they talk about are building a relationship that is equitable between partners and where listening and trust are central pieces of the relationship. They emphasize taking time for comprehensive analysis, because real solutions don’t happen overnight. Any plan must be adaptable to the current and changing situation on the ground. And perhaps most importantly, they are committed to providing ongoing support to the projects they start. For years they continue to encourage and provide technical support to the organizations they partner with.

I have talked a lot today about how to make change that really makes a difference in people’s lives. We all want to know that our donations of time and money are going to help those in need. There have been big discussions about it this past year, about who’s organization actually uses the largest portion of its finances to help the people in need. It’s a very big question. There are a lot of wonderful organizations doing great work in the world. I sincerely believe that the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is among the best.

But there’s another way to get a bigger bang for your buck. And that’s by telling other people about it. That’s right. The best way to get the full leverage out of your giving is to share that news with others. Start with your children. Tell them why you give to the organizations that you support. It’s a critical lesson that they need to learn. This is what we do.

Telling other people isn’t about being boastful. It’s not about proving how wonderful you are. It’s about setting the norm, being a model. WE can create a culture of generosity. But for that to happen, we have to bring our giving out of hiding. We have to tell other people about it.

Is someone willing to say something about a financial contribution they have made in the past year? We don’t want to hear how much, we want to hear why you gave, and you it made you feel.

I said some time ago, I would not talk about justice in the abstract, I wouldn’t talk about justice at all without giving you some concrete way to respond. It would be wonderful if you donate money to help the UUSC provide relief to survivors in Japan. But there’s also an action to be taken much closer to home.

UUSC is partnering with the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California, to help ensure that people everywhere, but especially here in California, gets access to clean drinking water.
Water is essential for life. Yet, nearly 1 billion people lack access to safe water and 2.5 billion do not have adequate sanitation — more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet. The statistics are staggering. Even more surprising is how simple and cost-effective the solutions are. Roughly speaking, every $1 spent in the clean-water and sanitation sector creates on average another $8 in costs averted and productivity gained. That’s a pretty amazing investment if you think about it.
Assembly member Mike Eng (D-Monterey Park) is sponsoring a six-bill package that, if passed, would make the human right to water into California policy. I know it’s shocking to think that here in California, in the United States, many many people cannot drink the water that comes out of their tap. In rural farming communities, the nitrogen from fertilizers has seeped into groundwater so much, that low-income farm workers are forced to buy bottled water to keep their families healthy. We’re not talking about the water tasting a little strange either. We’re talking about the government telling people that their tap water is unsafe and should not be consumed.

In 2009, grassroots activists, community organizations, and legislators made history here in California: the Human Right to Water Act of California (AB 1242) passed both the assembly and senate. Unfortunately, the bill was vetoed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2011, there is new governor, Jerry Brown; a new human-right-to-water bill (AB 685); and new hopes for the human right to water in California!
Today, we are asking that you sign a letters addressed to Jared Huffman, the Chair of Water Parks and Wildlife, Bob Wieckeowski, the Chair of Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials, and Lois Wolk, Chair of Governance and Finance Committee, to ask them to lend their support to the Human Right to Water Bill.

Honoring the rights and dignity of all who survive humanitarian crises is tough stuff. UUSC Justice Sunday is a stop on the road. The concern for justice comes back to us Sunday after Sunday and all week long throughout our lives. Opportunities abound to make it happen. It’s up to you. It’s up to us. We give; we receive; we partner. Earlier we sang about when our heart is in a holy place, when we trust the wisdom in each person’s story, and when we share from the depths of our self. As we close our time together, I want us to think deeply about the partnership model that UUSC embraces. Consider who the experts are in the struggle for justice, the people who experience the challenge themselves. And, consider consulting with them, like UUSC does, until “them” becomes “us.” Consider not taking action until we can proceed hand in hand, to create meaningful change, together.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Satryagraha: Soulforce"

2011-03-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

"Satyagraha: Soulforce"

The great thing about having a whole month to talk about one theme, is that we can dig into the topic more deeply. We often dig in so deep that I find myself presenting a different perspectives from one week to the next. Just two weeks about I said that suffering doesn’t lead to redemption. Suffering, especially through violence cannot possibly pay for the sins of the world in some cosmic balancing act. Redemption doesn’t work that way.

Well, today I want to talk about a kind of suffering and sacrifice that can earn redemption. In theological terms, we call it voluntary redemptive suffering. That’s the very formal way of describing the type of civil disobedience that we are all aware of. It was the tool of Gandhi, King, Nelson Mandela and others. It’s making oneself vulnerable to suffering in an effort to draw attention and compassion to a social evil. We voluntarily sacrifice our own well being so that the community might redeem itself and correct its ways.

Voluntary redemptive suffering does NOT mean that we accept senseless suffering that serves no purpose. Suffering inflicted on those who have not volunteered to receive it is certainly not what we are talking about. The redemption that we are talking about today is a call to suffer voluntarily, so that involuntary suffering might end.
As I said, we’re all familiar with this sort of activism. Nelson Mandela watched his people suffer involuntarily from the cruelties of apartheid. But he decided that his suffering would count. He didn't suffer apartheid in silence. He didn't join anti-apartheid bands who tortured and maimed their enemies (black and white alike). He took a public stand against the unjust laws, knowing the consequences. He was arrested, beaten, and imprisoned. That kind of voluntary, redemptive suffering moved minds and hearts across the world. The people who saw black Africans as immoral, promiscuous, less than human, learned the TRUTH in Mandela's acts of courage.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. watched his people suffer involuntarily from the cruelties of segregation. King refused to suffer in silence. He didn't agree with those who called for overthrowing segregation violently. King took a public stand against the unjust laws by breaking them. When he was arrested, he paid the consequences willingly and people noticed.

When the children of Birmingham marched against segregation, the nation saw them on the evening news being beaten by police, knocked down by fire hoses, and attacked by snarling dogs. For decades they had suffered segregation involuntarily and few seemed to notice let alone to care. But when those children finally took their stand, when they volunteered to suffer for the cause, the President, the Congress and the courts finally took notice.

And lets not forget Gandhi. Instead of paying a few pennies in salt tax to the British, Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea to make salt. Before he could lead the march to the British salt works, he was arrested and the protestors who took his place were beaten, harassed and abused with the world looking on in shock and horror. The Indians who followed Gandhi on the journey to nonviolence suffered willingly. And people around the world saw their suffering and demanded that they be set free.

Gandhi showed the world that when we take a voluntary stand against injustice, we don't know how the adversaries will react. However they respond, the goal is to take on the suffering without complaint or retaliation so that the adversaries will see the courage and witness the commitment to create change.

You may have noticed I have used the word “adversary” a few times today. “Adversary” is a word used intentionally, in place of enemy. One of the key aspects of Satyagraha or Soulforce is the belief in the inherent dignity and goodness of every person, even those who act unjustly. Adversaries are not evil or hateful or insane. They are "Victims of Untruth" as we have all been at one time or another.

Now that is a big, big, big challenge, to see the person who inflicts injustice and harm, not as an enemy but as an adversary. I can’t stress enough how difficult that is. But it is an essential piece of the sort of redemption that we are talking about today. Non-violence is not just a social justice tactic, it is a way of being in one’s heart. This sort of personal non-violence and ability to see an adversary as a victim of misinformation is the cornerstone of what Gandhi understood as Satyagraha, or soulforce.

In his own words, Gandhi said, “In the application of satyagraha, I discovered … that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.” (Gandhi, M.K. Statement to Disorders Inquiry Committee January 5, 1920 satyagrahi valvuloplasty (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 19, p. 206)

Satyagraga, truth-force, or soul-force, is a non-violence commitment to use non-violent means to demonstrate the truth so that both the oppressed and their adversaries might be freed.

That’s how we get voluntary redemptive suffering. Rather than inflicting force or suffering on our adversary, we approach them with patience and kindness, and inflict that suffering on ourselves instead.

You see the peace that we read about earlier in our responsive reading is a much deeper phenomenon than stopping military violence. Of course that is a tremendously important goal that each of these leaders sought. But, the peace that Gandhi spoke of was not simply a goal. It is a method, a strategy. The first step to creating lasting meaningful change in the world is cultivating non-violence within ourselves. Adversaries are not evil or hateful or insane. They are "victims of untruth" as we have all been at one time or another. Understanding that alone is a journey that can take a lifetime.

We all know the story of the amazing woman Rosa Parks. There are two versions of her story. They are both sort of inspiring, but one is the truth. The first story is that one day after years of giving up her seat to white people on the bus, Rosa Parks was tired. She had had enough. She said I’m not going to take it anymore and refused to move. That solitary act of courage and defiance sparked the Montgomery Buss Boycott, a major step in the civil rights movement. That’s one version of her story, the version that many of you are probably familiar with.

The other story is a little more complicated. Now several action’s like Ms. Parks’ had been taken in the past, but none of them had the sort of traction that civil-rights leaders had hoped for. They needed just the right person, someone with a perfectly clean record, a respected leader of the community who could withstand the public attention and legal entanglement. They found one. This is the story about Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist. At the time of her on that bus, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and she had recently attended the Highlander Folk School. That’s a social justice center in Tennessee that trained people to strategize for workers rights and racial equaility.

I think it’s critically important to tell this second story, this true story about who Rosa Parks really was. She was a woman plugged into a movement. She had had extensive training in non-violence. She knew that her adversaries were not malicious or crazy or evil. They were people, who were victims of untruth. She made it her mission to expose the truth to them, and to the whole world. Rosa Parks was not simply a tired commuter. She knew the consequences of her actions. And she willingly offered herself to be arrested and suffer the consequences. She offered herself to suffer, so that her adversaries might better understand the sickness of segregation.

In all this talk about justice leaders, it is important to point out that no one needs to be a saint to make a difference. In fact it is probably better if you are not. Every time I sing Gandhi’s praises, I am reminded of some of the personal lifestyle experiments he undertook. He nearly starved himself to death on repeated occasions, not for political purposes, but simply to see what his body could endure. He tried very hard to fully squelch any sexual urges that he had. He had an almost obsession with control over his own body.
I don’t aim to detract from Gandhi’s insights and leadership. But it is important that we recognize that he too was human. He was in many ways a very quirky person and his ascetic pursuits are quite contradictory to the celebration of life that Unitarian Universalists tend to embrace.

I’m not asking anyone to be an ascetic or a saint. I simply ask that we explore how non-violence, Satyagraha, soulforce, might inform our own action in the world.

Action and personal sacrifice happens in a variety of ways. In fact each one of you probably does a variety of different things to make the world a better place. Some of you give your resources of time and money to causes that you care about. Others of you commit to cultivating inner peace that will radiate to the wider world. I know many people make personal sacrifices large and small to help save our fragile and struggling environment. What do you do? I want you to just think of one or two things that you do, large or small. What do you do?

And now remember with me, the parable that I told in intergenerational time. Remember the heroine who saved the drowning people. First she dive in her self to save those in need. Then she recruited others to help with the cause. Finally she went to the source of the problem and asked that community to stop throwing people in the river. Then, right in front of them, she dove right back in to continue the struggle. She did it boldly in front of her adversaries. A critical part of voluntary redemptive suffering is that it needs to be witnessed to have its full affect. That’s right, it’s not just about jumping into the freezing cold water to save a drowning child. It’s about doing it with witnesses, so that they can see your willingness to sacrifice. They can see how much you care about saving that life.

We Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about taking action to make our world a better place. And we do a lot. The thing that we’re not so good about is sharing what we do with the wider world. You would be shocked to hear how reluctant people are to be chalice lighters on Sunday mornings. Some of them we practically have to beg for the permission to share with you the great work they have done for the world. That’s a big part of why we do have a chalice lighter every Sunday. It’s a moment to pry open the modesty in our culture, an opportunity to say wow, look what they did. Isn’t that awesome. Isn’t that inspiring.

It’s not such a bad thing to share with the world what you do. Part of the commitment toward good is a willingness to be an inspiration for others. As a wise man once said, no one lights a lamp and hides it’s light under a bushel.

I want you to think of that one or two things that you do to make the world a better place that I asked you about earlier. I want you to tell someone about that during the social hour after church. Now if I know you as I think I do, no one is going to jump out and say it. So I beg you to ask each other. Ask someone what sacrifice they made voluntarily to make our world a better place.

We’re not looking for saints here. Anyone can shine a light on the truth. It doesn’t have to be a giant flood light, just a spark will do. A spark can start a great fire.

-Amen-

Giving credit where it is due, much of my understanding of Soulforce and much of the actual material from this sermon comes from the organization by that name. Soulforce is an organization that puts to work the principles of non-violence to work for the full inclusion of GLBT people in religious institutions across the country. While their work is specific to one type of oppression, the principles they draw on are universal.

Sermon - Repairing the Web

2011-03-14T08:15:00.001-07:00

Repairing the Web

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We’re all familiar with that statement. And we tend to agree. If injustice is occurring in some place, we are called to step in and confront it. A geographical distance from the place of injustice does not remove override our responsibility to stop it, or at least speak out against it. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Well, today I want to broaden that concept a little bit, to deal not just with geographical distance, but with temporal difference. I’d like to suggest that injustices of the past, is a threat to justice in the present, if it doesn’t get addressed. That’s right, the injustices of a community’s past can linger on for centuries, raising their head over and over in different forms.
Today we are talking about dealing with injustices of the past. We are talking about our society seeking redemption for it’s historical sins. One of the most prominent and most controversial ways that redemption is often sought is through reparations.

In general terms, reparation is material compensation provided to the victims of injustice, or to their descendents. Today, the largest conversation about reparations revolves around slavery and African American descendents of slaves. There are also significant movements for reparations for American Indians.
And in some cases, reparations are actually made on a large scale. After World War II, the U.S. government apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and provided reparations of $20,000 to each survivor to compensate for loss of property and liberty during that period. And other countries have also opted to pay reparations for past grievances, such as the German government making reparations to Jews and survivors and descendants of the Holocaust.
You get the idea. Reparations are material compensation for a past injustice. But more than just a cash payment, reparations are even more powerful as a symbolic gesture. They make one step toward reconciliation, toward mending relationships that have been violated. And that’s what redemption is about after all.

There are two important stories that come out of the church where I grew up, in Tulsa Oklahoma. And as far as I can tell, there has been very little conversation about how these stories are pieces of larger, incredibly beautiful puzzle.
The better known story I have shard with you in a previous sermon. It has also been the topic of at least a few articles in the UU World magazine. It’s the story of how two churches became one. The story of how a White, upper-class Unitarian church found a new soul, and the story of how a struggling Black liberal evangelical congregation found a new home.
Rev. Carlton Pearson, an African American Pentecostal preacher, had founded one of Tulsa’s most prominent megachurches. By the late 1990s Higher Dimensions, had swelled to 6,000 members, who were contributing $60,000 a week into the collection plate. The church had added on an 800-seat balcony, installed major multimedia equipment, bought a 650-acre ranch, and had plans for to build a hotel. Carlton Pearson built that congregation from the ground up and it looked like the sky was the limit. It was like a Black Mariner’s.

But in 1996, Pearson had a revelation. In watching the victims of genocide in Rwanda, Pearson became angry at the God he knew. The idea that God might condemn any of these people, these victims of senseless violence to Hell was unfathomable. Pearson had a revelation, and he began to preach the gospel of inclusion to his congregation, the gospel that God’s love was not limited to those who had been born again, not even limited to Christians. He knew that no one would be excluded from God’s love, regardless of their religious beliefs. Carlton Pearson basically became a Christian Universalist.
But this message of love didn’t sit well with the evangelical world, or even his own congregation. In the midst of speaking his truth, the truth of Universal love, Pearson lost just about everything he struggled for. The mega-church crumbled. They lost thousands of members; his close-knit staff; his building. He lost use of his church’s name; rights to his own sermons, books, audio, and video; and lots of money. Worse than all that, he says, the venom he has felt from conservative Christians was shocking. His cleaners and his wife’s hairdresser refused to serve them, and his children were taunted at school and forbidden by parents to see friends.
From the congregation of 6,000, about 200 remained loyal to Pearson, and followed on a religious journey. The 200 or so survivors renamed themselves New Dimensions, and eventually found a new place to worship, at the All Souls Unitarian Church. Their worship service was held Sunday afternoons. Keep in mind, All Souls looks like any other Unitarian Church, just bigger. The congregation is overwhelmingly white, and mostly from an upper-middle background. They are a theological mix much like ours, some theists, some atheists, many agnostics, mostly refugees from other traditions. But, as a deep friendship grew between these two ministers, one a White Unitarian Universalist and one and African American Evangelical, both committed to racial justice. And so did the relationship between their congregations.
Eventually, New Dimensions became a part of All Souls Unitarian Church. With around 2,000 members, as the largest congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association, All Souls has become a radically inclusive, richly racially diverse community.
The contemporary worship service is like nothing I have ever seen in another Unitarian Universalist church. There is a praise band, a gospel choir, and most importantly, people on their feet singing, not out of a hymnal, but out of their heart. These two congregations have taken an amazing journey together, and their future looks stronger than ever. Who could have thought such a relationship was possible.

What has happened in Tulsa is a bit of a love story, one that we like to celebrate. But there is another story that happened at that same church in Tulsa. It’s a story that I think is deeply, deeply related.

This story is about reparations. As I said, reparations is typically talked about in reference to slavery or the oppression of American Indians, but it can also be targeted at more specific moments of injustice.
The injustice in this case was the Tulsa race riot. The sixteen-hour Tulsa riot in 1921, destroyed the Black business district in north Tulsa. When a white mob swept through the area of town, at least thirty-eight people were killed. Over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, an estimated 10,000 were left homeless, when 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fires.
Although racial tension was at a boiling point, the incident was sparked when a Black you man allegedly assaulted a white women in a downtown building. After the man’s arrest, the local paper ran two incendiary ariticles, one titled, “Nab the Negroe for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” and the other provided news or a lynching party that would gather that evening. The hatred that these articles fueled gave rise to a terrible moment of violence. The owner of that paper, the Tulsa Tribune was a leader member of All Souls Unitarian Church.
That moment, that terrible day is a scar on Tulsa’s history. For years the story was ignored, but in the 1990’s a few brave leaders reached out to begin a long-overdue healing process.
In the 1990s, a two-year effort lead by All Souls UU church encouraged the community to contribute to a voluntary reparations fund. Over $40,000 was collected and distributed. Two Tulsa Unitarian Universalist congregations, Church of the Restoration and All Souls Unitarian Church, were instrumental in these efforts to help survivors. $27,000 came from Unitarian Universalist sources including All Souls and Restoration Churches, the UUA's James Reeb Fund, and individuals. Obviously $40,000 cannot pay for the destruction and injustice of the past. It hardly makes a dent when spread among the survivors. But, it was a worth while effort. And effort by a few of those in power to reach out, to make a step towards mending a relationship.

As I said earlier, these two stories, one story of reparations for damages done and one story of communities coming together, these two stories are part of the same fabric. They inform each other. As we talk about reparations in the political world, and as we talk about redemption in the church world, let us remember that the material compensation is only a symbol of a much deeper need, a need for mending relationships. Reparations is not about buying away guilt. It’s not about being done with the past; it is about mending a relationship, to build a healthier community.

I have come to understand a similar feeling among American Indian activists that I know. Providing reparations to indigenous people at this point is a daunting concept. Even calculating the loss of land, the loss of human dignity, the pain, suffering and murder that occurred is an overwhelming task.
But today there is a strong movement among American Indians to seek some tangible reparations, a material symbol, and acknowledgement of past wrongs. It’s not to fully compensate for historical losses. Such compensation would be absolutely beyond financial measure. To goal is to move in the direction of a mended, healthier, more respectful relationship.
I ran across an article that describes that goal in detail. Rather than seeking just material reparations, William Bradford explains that creating justice is more complex than that. Rather than a one-time cash payment, he suggests an entire new understanding of justice. It has seven distinct stages: acknowledgement, apology, peacemaking, commemoration, compensation, land restoration, legal reformation, and reconciliation. I love this description of justice for two reasons. First, because it points out that the goal is not a simple material exchange. But more importantly Bradford’s model ends with the ultimate goal or reconciliation. (Beyond Reparations: An American Indian Theory of Justice, WILLIAM BRADFORD)

Reparations is not primarily about paying for material injustices. It is about repairing the complex tapestry of community. Redemption is not about making amends and going in your separate directions. The goal is to mend relationships.

Today’s intergenerational story was “The Dog and the Heartless King.” Remember, the dog in the court kept barking and barking until the King has offered enough food to everyone in his kingdom. The king was so selfish, he had never realized just how many people were in such profound need around him. But, this gigantic barking dog helped him to see the errors of his ways.
The quick and easy interpretation of the story may be that we need a barking dog, so that we as a country, might be motivated to feed the hungry and care for the sick. Certainly there are multitudes in our society, just like the kingdom of the heartless king, who are hungry and cold. Perhaps we need a barking dog.
But my understanding of the story is that the dog is already barking. The challenge is to hear it for what it is. Based on centuries of colonialism, slavery, corporate exploitation, and domination of the Earth, our own dog is barking. It just sounds a little different. We don’t live in a children’s story after all. But, The earth is crying out. The bombs of conquest are deafening, the racial inequality and tension that persist. All of these realities are the giant dog barking. That dog will keep barking. Our history will continue to remain with us, until we can respond and heal from it, until we can seek redemption.

Ash Wednesday is also the beginning of the season of Lent. A time of sacrifice and repentance before Easter. A

In closing, I want to revisit our reading from earlier. Both the poetry and the message a worth repeating. In this passage from the book of Isaiah that we read together earlier, God is talking about what kind of worship is fitting and meaningful for his people.

From Isaiah 58:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see them naked, to cover them, and not hide yourself from your own kin?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

We have only begun to see the very tip of the potential greatness that this diverse country could be. This talk of redemption and healing from past injustices is not just the stuff of heart-ache. It is also the stuff of hope. For the dog to stop barking in our land, it’s time to seek some redemption. It is time for the United States to make manifest a new destiny. A destiny built not on expansion and exploitation, but a destiny founded on healing and health, and right relationship.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Together We Share, From This We Live"

2011-03-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

You may be relieved to hear that we are moving on from the topic of Evil. Throughout February we were talking about evil as a theological concept. Is it out there, or in us? What kind of power does it have, and how do we resist it? All that stuff. But this month we are talking about redemption. Basically redemption is the question of how we overcome our shortcomings. No one is perfect, but we seek the security of knowing we have been good enough. So how do we redeem ourselves, in the eyes of each other, in the eyes of God, and in according to our own values? How do we redeem ourselves and when do we know how much is enough?

Well the traditional Christian answer to redemption is a good place to start the conversations, probably because it’s the most clear cut answer that I know of. According to most of Christian teaching, believers are redeemed by the suffering of Jesus on the cross. His suffering roughly 2000 years ago paid for the sins of all humanity. So it is the role of faithful Christians to be grateful for that sacrifice he, and God his father made on their behalf. As an side note, that’s why the innocence and purity of Jesus is so important. Because his suffering was not for his own sins or wrong-doing, but for those of sinful humanity.

This probably strikes some of you as a little violent, or a lot violent. God the creator of all things created sinful humans. Those humans are so bad that God they would be sent to Hell for eternity at after death. So to avoid such a fate for humans, God sacrificed his only son to be tortured to death. But Jesus’s suffering of course wouldn’t save everyone from Hell. Only those who believed in this cosmic payment for sins, this redemption would be saved from the fiery depths.
Well a couple of women theologians, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker were deeply troubled by this whole idea. So they wrote a book to explore the idea of redemption through violence. It’s called “Proverbs of Ashes.” In that book they talked about the ways that that traditional Christian idea of redemption sanctioned violence, especially against women. They tell story after story about domestic abuse that is hidden by or even explicitly supported by religion. But they knew better. Violence is not life affirming, it is not holy, it is not redemptive. What is redemptive about Jesus’ death, and the important thing about any time a person suffers is the healing community that gathers in response.

They write “We have experienced life-giving communities that foster knowledge of spirit, awareness of presence. We know that, at their best, healthy communities practice the right use of the powers of life and lead people to experience wholeness, right relationship, and beauty. When this happens, such communities teach us to know ourselves and the world as sacred and sustain an ethic of appreciative care for life.” (p. 9)

That is a whole lot powerful theology in just a few sentences. But that is just the theology that we focus on today. The fact is, redemption doesn’t’ come through pain and sacrifice. It certainly doesn’t come through violence, especially needless violence within a family. Redemption comes when we join together in a community, when we create space for one another to grow into our best selves. Redemption isn’t there to be earned, it is there to be realized. And when we spend the time to reflect the value that we see in one another, we teach one another that invaluable lesson. You are good enough, just as you are.

I want to go back a little bit to talk about the way that these authors found redemption in the person of Jesus. They argued that, rather than the violent act of crucifixion, Jesus is a redeeming figure because of the community that he built around him and the relationships that he modeled. It is that community that came together to heal from the suffering of violence that is the good news, not the violent act itself.
The redemption that comes out of disaster is the community that gathers in response. We saw this reality in the wake of September 11th. Our whole country, especially the city of New York, was transformed into a community of healing and support. It was an amazing moment of clarity and solidarity. I’m not talking about the political nighrmare that took place in Washington. I’m talking about the way we as individual people cared for one another. We were suddenly tender, more gentle, and more giving of our resources. We saw our brothers and sisters were in need. It’s what we do, it’s what is right. When disaster strikes we come together. Perhaps the best point of contrast was the community of support and healing that failed to emerge after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. To this day, we aren’t all that concerned by the destruction of that horrible storm. But we remain traumatized by a national the lack of supportive response.
It happens on all kinds of scales. I often see it as families come together with a sick relative or after a loved on has died. It happened when Rep. Gabriel Giffords and other innocent people were shot. It happened in Haiti. You have your own stories of this type of healing community, maybe in a large scale disaster, or more likely within your own family.

The community that we build in response to tragedy is redeeming, powerful, healing, and holy. It’s what we do, and arguably it is what helps us survive. That instinct to come together and chip in literally saves lives. That begs the question, do we have to wait for that tragedy to come along, or can we create life affirming community here and now, every day? I am committed to the belief that yes, we can. And that’s what we aim to do as a religious community.

Every Sunday we get together here to talk about what is important to our lives. During joys and sorrows we lift up those major things that have occurred in our individual lives. During our time of meditation and prayer we commune with God and with our highest ideals. During the sermon, I do my best every Sunday to offer a core message, a message that speaks to the fundamental needs and desires, and perhaps most importantly the hopes that we share. And then there is the music of worship. The songs we sing and those that we listen to, take us to a deeper place, a place of hearing what really matters.

We build that a healing community together, not in aftermath of tragedy, but in the presence of each other’s lives. Rather than waiting for the big one to hit, or waiting for a near-death experience, we come here. Maybe some people don’t need the weekly reminder of what is most important in their lives. Maybe they are much more on target than me. But I find it helpful to have Sunday, every Sunday, to remind me of the healing power of community.

We are social animals after all. We depend on one another to survive. I’m often fascinated by how physically weak we are as human beings. Compared to just about any other animal, we are remarkably poorly suited for survival on our own in the wild. We have not fur for protection. We aren’t particularly fast or strong. We don’t dig or climb. I suppose we could gather berries, if we didn’t get eaten by larger predators first.
My point is, thank God for our big overactive human brains. Our mental capacity more than compensates for our lack of physical significance. We can use logic to solve problems and create tools, to feed ourselves.
But the real magic comes when we use those brains to work together. We organize in community to share resources, labor and skills. Humans have certainly thrived on the planet earth, some might say overwhelming way. And we have done it by helping one another.
But it’s not just food and shelter that we help one another with. We develop as individuals within community. I would even argue that we become ourselves within community. The people around us, from the time we are born to the time that we die, help form us. And their love and support keeps us going.
Obviously sharing food and shelter have sustained human community in amazing ways. But also our ability to share our emotional lives with one other shapes our lives. In some ways it is just as necessary for survival as food is. As we sing together every Sunday, From you I receive, to you I give. Together we share, and from this we live.

But I want to get back to this question of redemption. How do we overcome our shortcomings in the eyes of God, each other, or our own values. The version of redemption that we talk most about, and the version that I think most of us feel, is the redemption that comes from our Unitarian roots. It’s the notion of redemption that we can and must improve ourselves and the world around us.
There’s nothing more puritanical in us than this drive toward perfection, in ourselves and in the wider world. We will talk about this Unitarian redemption in the weeks to come as we discussion reparations and non-violent civil-disobedience. This is the type of thing that most of us jump into to feel better about ourselves. We write letters and raise money; we educate and we protest. We march and organize. But I do wonder, where does it stop. Where does this exhausting train of improvement and work finally come to the station? Where do we find solace? Because, this world has a whole bunch of problems. If I start now, I can make a small dent. And as for perfecting myself, well I’m sorry to say, but perfection just isn’t in the cards in this lifetime. I already feel tired and anxious just thinking of the work there is to get done.

Fortunately, there’s another message of redemption at the root of our religious tradition. And that is Universalism. Universalists believe that God would not condemn anyone to Hell. No one is excluded from the family. No one is left out in the rain. No one is so despised that healing is not in order.

The good news of Universalism that we need such a dose of is that Love wins out. That’s right. With all our failures and our foibles. With our inability to create a perfect earth, we are not excluded from the family of love. In Universalism, love wins. We build beloved community centered on love and forgiveness. It’s not about being good enough or working hard enough or earning our way to salvation. It’s about accepting that we are all broken and we are all whole. And we are all worthy of love, God’s and each others’.

You may have already seen this chalice. I have brought it with me to church a couple of times. Of all the ones that sit next to my desk, this is my favorite chalice, because it reminds me of this message of Universalism. You see, the chalice is both broken and whole at the same time. It actually came to me through a Christian community rather than a UU one. They use it to serve their communion. But I think it’s equally appropriate for our Unitarian Universalist chalice to be both broken and whole at the same time.

It reminds us, at the center of our religious life, as we affirm our values and what is sacred to us. It reminds us that each person, you and me and everyone we know is both broken and whole at the same time. We are flawed, and loveable.

Redemption comes in, overcoming our challenges comes in, when we remind one another of our sacred worth through building community together. Redemption isn’t so much something that we have to earn, as something we remember and remind one another about.

We have talked a good deal recently about growing our congregation in numbers. We need around twenty additional members for UUFLB to be financially healthy in the long run. Of course more would be even better. So we talk about all the things that we might do: better communications, different events, personal invitations, all sorts of strategies. But growing isn’t just about a list of things to do, it’s also abut offering our love and acceptance to the people we encounter. And I’m not even talking about being friendly and polite. I’m talking about wrapping your heart around someone and letting them know they are appreciated for who they are.
Think back about when you first came to UUFLB or to a UU church for the first time. Not just why a UU church rather than another, but why did you look for a church in the first place. Nine times out of ten, I find that it’s because people want a community. They want authentic loving community. People come here looking for a group of compassionate people to stand with them and tell them “it will be okay, you are okay just as you are.”

Let us be such a place. Let us gathered here know that it will be okay, that we are okay just as we are. Because in the end, love wins. We have inherited a tremendous gift in the message of Universalism. Let us share that redeeming message of love with one another and with a world in need.

-Amen-

Sermon - "Trapping the Human Spirit"

2011-02-28T09:44:00.001-08:00

Trapping the Human Spirit
My experience in jail was short, but it left a lasting impression. In my early twenties I was arrested for trespassing. I was with a group of around fifty people who gathered to block the exit to the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. That’s sort of like their General Assembly. Thousands of United Methodists had gathered to vote on the business of their faith tradition, and we were protesting one of those votes in regard to gays in the church. Our slogan was “No exit without justice,” so we blocked the exit until they voted for more inclusion of GLBT people in the church.
The details of why we were there are not important today. What is important is what came next. We were all arrested and sent off to the local jail. Being arrested for civil disobedience with renowned civil-rights activists is a fundamentally different thing from being arrested under any other circumstance. Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi was in a jail cell across the hall from me. And James Lawson, who worked directly with MLK as a strategist during the Civil Rights era was in the cell next to mine. This was no ordinary jail experience. And still what I experienced there will never be forgotten.
In the six hours that I spent in jail, my thoughts raced. We were arrested on Friday morning and there was some question if we would all be processed and released before the court closed for the weekend. The jail cell was stark cinderblock. I remember the one meal we were served was a bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread. That was it. As a young college student who was used to having agency over my own destiny, this short time of confinement was utterly foreign to me. I was prepared, I was treated with reasonable respect, and still the experience of jail was one of complete disempowerment.
My short experience in jail was one I will never forget. You can do nothing for yourself, nothing. You can’t make a phone call, choose the food you will eat, choose what clothing you will wear. There are no choices, nothing to do for yourself but sit and wait for the person in charge to tell you what to do next.
Today we are talking about America’s prison industry and how it traps the human spirit. But not just the spirit of those incarcerated. It traps the spirit of our county, as all of us are complicit in the structure, and all of us reap the results of a system built on revenge rather than rehabilitation.

History
Before we dive into the challenges of the prison industry today, I think it’s important that we get a sense of this history that brought us here.
Incarceration has not always been a common form of punishment. Corporal punishment, forced labor, and social ostracism were far more common forms of punishment in the ancient world, medieval Europe, and even in England and colonial America. But that changed in the 18th Century For the first time the idea emerged that restricting a person's liberty would itself be significant punishment for crime, and that a measured amount of time served could be assigned in proportion to the severity of the crime.
Most laws in colonial America were based on religious law. So, the first prisons in the independent United States were established as "penitentiaries.” Their prisoners were considered religious "penitents," serving time for their sins. These early jails gained a lot of positive attention for their high goals of perfecting society through incarceration. But despite their high moral aims, they soon became as overcrowded, dirty, and dangerous European dungeons.
By the late 19th Century, outrage over prison conditions led to the "reformatory" movement, which attempted to redefine prison's role as that of "reforming" inmates into model citizens, by providing education, work, and counseling.
A 1930s building wave of rural institutions where the setting was assumed to help rehabilitate prisoners, such as San Quentin and Sing-sing, saw a major increase in the size of individual facilities, leading to the nickname "Big House."
In the 1970s judges became more receptive to claims of prisoners' rights, and they began to mandate significant improvements in many conditions for prisoners. But those new standards ran head on with the new crimes, sentencing laws, and prison population explosion of the "War on Drugs." Resources intended for rehabilitation went to drug law enforcement. New prison construction intended to reduce overcrowding and improve the chances of rehabilitation were barely complete before they were filled to capacity with drug offenders. From the 1980s on, prisons have been built in increasingly remote locations and loaded with increasingly harsh rules and intentionally harsh conditions.

American prisons have a two hundred year history of well-meaning but short-lived attempts at reform. Today they are undisputedly over crowded, dangerous, and fundamentally lacking in meaningful opportunities for rehabilitation.
Today, the United States currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2½ million prisoners, that is more than one in a hundred adults in prison and jails in the United States. Among industrialized nations, the United States incarcerates the largest percentage of its population. The U.S. incarceration rate is five to ten times that of other democracies.

We have a problem here and not many people are talking about it. We have a problem and more jails with more beds does not seem to be the answer. We have a problem that is so big, that I would dare to call it evil. That’s right, the sprawling prison industry in the United States is evil. There is no other word to describe a system that so quietly places such blight on our society. It is evil in two different ways.

First, there is evil in a system that dehumanizes a group of people and does it so quietly that it doesn’t raise the concern of the wider society. It is the banality of evil, a slow systematic chipping away at our society. It’s no one person’s fault, but a system has been set into motion that destroys the fabric of our society.
And evil is present in the hearts of human beings. Unfortunately much of the growth of prison industry and deliverance of harsher sentences is rooted in a desire for revenge rather than repair, punishment rather than rehabilitation. Evil marks America’s prisons in the systemic injustices and in the hard heartedness that obsesses on revenge. First I want to talk about the evil of systems.

To begin with, there are stark disparities in the racial composition of our nation's prisons. African Americans account for fully half of the prison population but they comprise only thirteen percent of the total population. I know that statistics are hard to swallow and I’m using a lot of them today. Just know that the number of Black men in prison is way, way out of proportion.
The evil is not so much in the fact that there are so many African-American’s in prison, as it is in the way that prison accentuates inequalities, ensuring the disempowerment of generation after generation.

The most well-known racially aligned injustice is political disenfranchisement of Blacks. (Ten states deny voting rights for life to ex-felons. According to the Sentencing Project, 46 states prohibit inmates from voting while serving a felony sentence, 32 states deny the vote to felons on parole, and 29 states disenfranchise felony probationers.) Most states deny voting rights to inmates, and many of them deny the right to people even after they are released from prison. Thanks to those rules, 13 percent of all Black men in the U.S. have lost their electoral rights. Let me say that again, 13 percent of Black men in the U.S. have lost their right to vote.

But the economic effects are probably even more important. Having a record is disastrous to the prospect of finding a job. Most sources cite unemployment rates as high as 50 percent for people with records. Putting it all together, we see that since incarceration rates are especially high among those with the least power in the labor market (young and unskilled minority men), and having a history of incarceration deeply impacts employment opportunity, it seams pretty clear that U.S. incarceration exacerbates the inequality present in our society.

And we should remember that the Black community has a unique history with the prison system. After two hundred years of slavery in the United States, the government of southern states contrived a plan to essentially recreate the system.

After the end of the Civil War. Farmers and businessmen needed to find replacements for the labor force. Beginning in 1868, convict leases were issued to private parties to supplement their workforce. The government contracted out prison labor to private industry. Of course any means of legal defense for Blacks during this time were negligible. Prisons and Jails in the Southern states essentially supplied an extension of slavery until the early 20th century.
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the relationship between prisons and private companies continues today, only in different form. Thanks to the privatization of prisons, there is a great deal of money to be made off of the incarceration of as many people as possible. That’s right, prisons are big business for corporations who own them.
Government has depended on private companies to provide some of the services food preparation and transportation for a long time. But in the 1980s a shift occurred. With an exploding prison population with the War on Drugs, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and private-sector involvement in prisons moved from contracting of specific services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons. Private companies in the United States operate 264 correctional facilities, housing almost 99,000 adult offenders. 99,000 people are incarcerated by for-profit industry in our country.
(Of course the goal of privately run prisons it to save money. But a good amount of research questions exactly that claim. Evidence usually shows that private prisons are neither demonstably more cost-effective, nor more efficient than public ones. Yet still State and Federal tax money funneled toward private corporations to run OUR prisons.)
I can’t quite put my finger on it. I can’t quite put it into words yet, but our turning prison into an industry is deeply troubling. Addressing the wrongs committed in our society, holding dangerous people, and ideally offering an opportunity for rehabilitation should not be a money-making project. I am deeply troubled that as a society we have made an industry of incarcerating human beings. Fiscally responsible or not, privatizing American prisons is an affront to the inherent worth and dignity of our brothers and sisters.

The third and final piece of the systemic evil that shapes our prisons is the “War on Drugs.” By all measures, it has failed at everything except incarcerating more people, most of them Black men.
In 1986 the US Defense Department concluded that using armed forces to slow the production of cocaine was ineffective and would actually raise the profitability of selling it in the U.S. But we continued to pour money into the project.

(In 1986, the US Defense Department funded a two-year study by the RAND Corporation, which found that the use of the armed forces to interdict drugs coming into the United States would have little or no effect on cocaine traffic and might, in fact, raise the profits of cocaine cartels and manufacturers.)

In the early 90s a Clinton administration report found that $3 billon should be transferred from the war on drug’s law enforcement focus toward treatment, and that drug treatment was twenty-three times more effective than the supply-side (crime enforcement side) “war on drugs.”

(During the early to mid-1990s, the Clinton administration ordered and funded a major cocaine policy study, again by RAND. The Rand Drug Policy Research Center study concluded that $ 3 billion should be switched from federal and local law enforcement to treatment. The report said that treatment is the cheapest way to cut drug use, stating that drug treatment is twenty-three more times effective than the supply-side "war on drugs")

Despite over $7 billion spent annually towards arresting[95] and prosecuting nearly 800,000 people for marijuana offenses Surveys report about 85% of high school seniors find marijuana "easy to obtain." That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1975.

I could go on with the details, but you get the picture. Federal and State government are pouring money, our money into ineffective programs based on punishment and retribution. Punishment that disproportionately impacts racial minorities and supports a multi-billion dollar industry. And yet I understand there is a marijuana club at Laguna Woods.

These three realities, privatization, the war on drugs, and racial bias are an interconnected system of oppression. They come together to in the form of systemic evil to shape the modern prison industry. There is no other word for a system that so efficiently and so quietly destroys one segment of the population while making money for another.

As I said, the evil of the sprawling prison industry is demonstrated mostly in numbers. It is an evil that can be and must be challenged through political advocacy.

But there is another type of evil lurking in this equation. It is, frankly, the evil that rests in human hearts. Too often, and I fear increasingly so, the government, our courts, our law enforcement, the entire justice system is not focused on protecting citizens or reforming criminals. It is focused on punishment and retribution. The desire for revenge is an ugly, ugly thing. We all know this feeling. In many ways we consider it a natural thing, but that does not make it right. The criminal justice system cannot be a state sanctioned means for us to seek revenge. We cannot allow our government to function in a way that encourages the anger and violence of the human heart. There is another way, and we must hold out hope for more meaningful way of dealing with our brothers and sisters who break the law. A way of justice that offers redemption.

Redemptive justice recognizes justice as relational. Its purpose is to restore wholeness and rightness in the social order and in the disposition of the offender, not to exact revenge. It is a process of education, socialization, and empowerment so that they may be able to contribute constructively to society again. Restorative justice is a process that enables the offender to reconcile with the victim through appropriate restitution, community service, and healing measures.

Separation from society may be an appropriate punishment for many crimes, but society's responsibility does not end there. A corrections system driven by compassionate justice would prepare offenders for successful reentry into society. An overwhelming majority of those who are incarcerated return to their communities having received minimal or no opportunities for rehabilitation. In a reformed system, they will receive substantial rehabilitative services, including mental health treatment, educational programs, and vocational training during incarceration and employment and transitional housing once released. Redemption, rehabilitation, and restoration are not only more humane for those who have fallen off the main societal track; they are more effective and less costly in addressing the criminal justice needs of our whole society.
Earlier we sang the song Circle ‘round for freedom. Circle ‘round for peace. For all of us imprisoned, circle for release. That’s just the idea that I want to get at today. You see the evil of the prison system is not just about those unfortunate men and women who find themselves incarcerated. We all, as tax payers, as citizens, as members of a moral community are implicated. When we allow our civic institutions to embody the values of punishment and revenge, we build those values into the fabric of who we are as a people. Prison reform is not just for those who are incarcerated. Justice is not just for the sake of the oppressed. It is for the well being of our souls. It is what we are called to seek and to build. It is what is required of us. To Circle round for freedom. Circle ‘round for peace. For ALL of us imprisoned, circle for release.
Evil in the system that dehumanizes calls for advocacy and political action, but evil in human hearts calls for deep discernment, and a type of spiritual leadership that Unitarian Universalists are well-positioned to make. But, doing so means getting serious about naming what we see. We have spent the month of February talking about evil, not just as a theology lesson, but to prepare us to understand our wider world. It is vocabulary that is important. It is essential that we pause to look at the world around us to name what is not working, so that one day we might come together to fix it.

-Amen.-

Sermon - Diagnosing Difference

2011-02-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

This morning we are talking about the way that we understand differences between people. Not differences in politics of belief. We talk about that all the time. Today we are talking about physical differences. One quick answer is to say that we are all the same and none of those physical details of a person should reall matter. Well, whether the should matter or not, we notice those differences. We see them. Whether we are talking about disabilities, racial or gender differences, or any other characteristic, we recognize differences between bodies. There’s no denying them. But we have a choice in how we understand those differences.

We talk quite a bit about racial differences on occasion. We talk about the struggle for justice and equality for people of color. But today we will focus on differences of physical ability. In some ways that is about disability, the name that we give when a person is not able to function in the way most people function. But difference also happens to each of us, when we are sick or injured. As some point in our lives, each of us faces a body that’s somehow different from the norm. Each one of us has to face up to being some how physically impaired. That’s a tough, tough moment. But there is hope.

We have all had challenges with our bodies. For some strange reason we think that we are alone in that experience. Maybe that’s because Mr. Mc Duffy McBean keeps us feeling that way so he can make money off of us. I don’t know. But we have a strange habit of feeling isolated in our difference.
Perhaps this little exercise will change that a bit.
Raise your hand if there are things you can no longer do that you used to enjoy.
Raise your hand if there are things you have never been able to do but society thought you should be able to.
Raise your hand if your body has ever made you feel different or ashamed.
Thank you! Not so alone are we?
The most important thing we ever learn and experience from church may be the radical fact that you are not along. You are not alone in feeling like your body is a challenge or source of difficulty.

This month we are focussing on Evil at UUFLB. I felt like it was important to talk about evil in human differences for a couple of reasons. One is that for so long we have been told that our bodies, any bodies are somehow dirty, or not as good. They are just something that we have to live with until our soul moves on to another place. This is a huge piece of mainline Christian thought, thanks primarily to the Apostle Paul. He was strangely afraid of his natural desires, and as a result he set Christianity on a course for self-loathing. And Christianity is not alone in this. A whole variety of traditions claim that our bodies are bad or some how less important, less worthy than our souls. I actually believe our bodies are magnificent miraculous gift, that allow us to live and love and to make manifest our dreams. Our bodies are good.
What is not good. I dare say, what is evil, is a social environment that deems some bodies better than others. Whether based on gender, race, physical or mental ability, thinness or fatness, any ranking of the worth of a human being based on physical attributes, well it is evil. I think Paul had it wrong, he had it dead wrong. It’s not our bodies that are evil. What is evil is judgment and shame, self-loathing, repression. Our bodies are not evil. What is evil is the way we deny them.

Our bodies are a gift. For you and for me and for everyone we know, our physical bodies are a tremendous gift. It’s hard to believe that sometimes, when they bring us pain or when the limit us in some way. But consider this.
Flawed as they may be, our bodies are the vessel for our life. Without this physical being, without flesh and bone we cannot eat, or drink. We cannot breathe. On the most basic level, or bodies are what make our lives possible.
But they offer so much more than simply being alive. Our bodies offer us an opportunity to be in relationship with other people. They allow us to build frienship with others. They allow us to care for our children and grandchildren. And our bodies allow us to be lovers. That’s right, we are physical, spiritual and sexual beings. Our bodies help us to connect to one another in magnificent ways. That’s not something to be ashamed of, but something to celebrate.
And there’s more. Our bodies allow us to join in the creative process. We have hands to sculpt, voices to make a joyful noise. We have ears and eyes to absorb all the beauty that surrounds us. Some people have spent a life-time training themselves, training their bodies to create beauty beautiful things. Others of us, well we just like to sing a few hymns and doodle on scratch paper. But our bodies are what allow us to create beauty in the world.
And they allow us to make a better world. There are a multitude of ways of caring for other people and caring for our earth. Whether it is in raising children or advocating for justice, planting and organic garden or volunteering at the homeless shelter, our bodies allow us to care for the wider world. They allow us to live out our convictions. They allow us to put action to our thoughts. And after all, isn’t that what gives life its meaning.

Our bodies are a gift, but sometimes they are broken and sick. Sometimes they need healing. Fortunately, a whole slough of people dedicate their professional lives to making that possible. Nurses, doctors, therapists, surgeons, counselors, lab technicians, emergency responders and an innumerable list of hospital support crew. They bravely attend to the urgent physical needs.

But I think that we can all participate in the healing of bodies. Certainly we all want to. When a loved one is in pain, who doesn’t feel helpless? I want to suggest that we can help, even if we don’t have a hospital badge or a degree.

If you are a regular reader of The Sealight, our newsletter, you know that there is usually a section called “Circle of Light.” That’s a place where we lift up the names of people who are sick or hurting in some way. It keeps us together as a community as we care for one another.
But I only recently found out where this name comes from. I’ve been here for three and a half years as the minister and I’m still finding out some pretty important stuff. The name “Circle of Light” comes from a very specific ministry that was a part of this congregation. For years, one of the members named Dorothy Nolty lead, what I would call a healing circle. People who were ill or hurting would gather in a circle and Dorthy lead them through a guided meditation. Then they would offer healing thoughts and energy to others in the group, not in a generic way, but in a focus individualized fashion.
I finally found out about this group as Russ told me it is a big part of what got him through his battle with cancer. I don’t know how many other people felt supported, even healed by this group. Probably several considering its tenure and the fact that its legacy lives on in our newsletter.
Why all this talk of healing in a sermon about how our bodies are different and sometimes flawed? Because I think it points to a radical act of holding hope, and a radical act of concentrating your energy on love and healing. So often when we are faced with sickness and disease, the pain gets transformed into anger. Dorthy offered a different way. I have since heard others of you talk about this practice of sending healing thoughts to those you know are hurting. Stick with me here, I know this sounds pretty wuwu out there to some of you but stick with me.
When your loved ones are hurting and there is nothing you can do, try pausing. And visualize a warm ball of love, compassion and healing glowing in your own chest. Then send that ball out, and offer it to the person in pain.
My faith tells me that it will help. Maybe an actual energy gets transferred from the healer to the healed. Maybe this sort of concentration can manifest in physical healing. I hold out hope for that possibility. But what I know, is that focusing our energy and our thoughts on love makes us healthier people. It makes us stronger, and it makes us more able to stay in a loving relationship with those who are in pain.
Only a few of us are blessed with the medical know how to help heal the injured person. And oh how we long to help when we really care. Try offering your thoughts and your love. Just try it. There’s nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

There are also ways that we can respond to assist people with disabilities. Ways of engaging that foster more genuine and respectful relationship, so I want to name a few of those.

If you offer assistance, wait until the offer is accepted, then listen for instructions.
Speak directly to people rather than through their companion or sign language interpreter.
Offer to shake hands when introduced. People with limited hand use can usually shake hands and offering a left hand is an appropriate greeting.
Identify yourself and others who may be around when speaking with someone with a visual disability.
Don't lean against or hang things on someone's wheelchair. Remember people with disabilities treat their chairs as an extension of their bodies.
Place yourself at eye level when speaking with someone.
Listen attentively when talking with people who have difficulty speaking and wait for them to finish. If necessary ask questions that can be answered with short answers or head nods. Never pretend to understand, instead repeat what you understood and allow the person to respond.
Tap a person who has a hearing disability on the shoulder or wave your hand in the air to get his or her attention. Speak slowly and clearly and keep hands and food clear of your mouth when communicating with someone who can read lips.
Finally, relax. Most of what I have just said is very simple if you take a moment to think about it. Be aware of what you are doing and saying, and your best intentions will fill in the gaps.

Accessibility is a key word in any discussion of disability. Clearly, wheelchair users should be able to get into and throughout buildings, and people who are blind or deaf should have access to appropriate assistance. But unfortunately, we tend to understand accessibility as a one-way street. Bringing them to us, bringing the outsider in, offering access to the American dream.
But offering access is about more than just invited the outisider in. A person coming from a different persepctive can bring a completely different way of approaching problems. When we talk about disability and access, we must talk about accessibility that goes in both directions. Inviting everyone to participate means recognize that people with disabilities have much to teach the rest of the world. Accessibility is not just about being nice and hospitable, it is about being in complex relationship and learning from one another. Their "different" experiences, our different experiences are filled with lessons for everyone.

Before we close our time together, I want to say briefly that this is not the sermon that I had intended to preach today. You may have noticed that the description is somewhat different from the content of this sermon.
That’s because I came to realize what we need isn’t a lecture on the postmodern deconstruction of science. What we needed, what I needed and I think you needed as well, was the life affirming message of Unitarian Universalism. That is, that you are not alone in your joy, and you are not alone in your pain. We stand with one another and there is indisputable power in the relationships that we build. And you and I both needed to hear that these bodies that we carry around, no matter how flawed or imperfect, they are what we have to work with. They are our tool for living in this world. They are beautiful. And it’s high time that we celebrated them, rather than moping about their differences.

Amen.

Sermon - "The Problem of Evil"

2011-02-12T08:34:00.001-08:00

The Problem of Evil
People have been wondering about the problem of evil since they have been wondering about anything. As Alexander’s mother explained to him, we all have terrible no-good very bad days. Even people in Australia do. But why, why do bad things happen to good people? This is a core challenge of religious of philosophical life. Why do bad things happen, and how can we transform the bad into good. For the month of February we will be talking about evil here at UUFLB. It’s a heavy topic. In fact the Intergenerational reading set up evil to be a more lighthearted concept than it really should be. The challenges that Alexander faced were frustrating and real for a young boy. But as we talk about evil, I hope we have the courage to hold more significant issues up to the light, at least for this month. We are talking about bigotry, starvation, needless degradation of the environment, genocide and the like.

Often when we approach the problem of evil, whether on a grand scale or a personal one, we want to move toward quick answers, but that is a mistake. We have all heard someone offer a quick off the cuff answer to a personal tragedy. Saying God needed that person in heaven, or this suffering will make him or her a stronger person. I always cringe at those moments. Although they are well intennded, those quick answers can be terribly insensitive. When we rush to a quick and easy answer, it’s usually not a good one.
All of March we will talk about redemption, that is how we return to the good. But for this month, I want to challenge us to sit with the very difficult topic of evil. It’s something that humanity has wondered about forever, so I figure we can give it a month here in our worship services.
The classical question of Evil that we hear about in our culture even has a specific name. It is called “Theodicy”. That is the question of evil in a monotheistic context. If God is good and all-powerful, then how can evil exist in the world. It’s a sort of theological algebra problem. With an all-powerful all-good God on one side, and the existence of evil on the other side. It doesn’t match up, so something has to give.

For the most part, the challenge of the problem of evil revolves around the goodness or power of God, which for many of us here is a very solid belief. But not all of us are so solid on a belief in God, especially the omniscient and omnipotent God involved in the problem of evil.
But that doesn’t let us off the hook. While UUs have a diverse theology, we do hold a few key concepts in common. One is that creation is inherently good. The world that we live in is a wonderful place. And the other is life in inherently good and worth living deeply. With or without some idea of an omnipotent God, we still have to face up to the fact that sometimes life is painful and hard. Sometimes things happen that seem categorically wrong. Call it evil or something else, but some very bad things happen in this good world, in our good lives. So what gives? How do we answer this problem of evil? Why do bad things happen to good people?

I want to take you on a quick tour of the problem of evil with some of the answers that different people have come up with. Each one of these answers could be a book with it’s own strengths and weaknesses. It’s likely the one of these will appeal to you and your sense of what is right and fair. Try to hang on to that because I’d love to hear what rings true for you. And remember, this is just a surface level sampling of some of the different answers.

One of the most common classical answers, and one that we hear often today is the idea that difficult experiences are a sort of training ground. Through our suffering difficulties, we can become better people, or our soul can be purified in a way. Those who have a strong sense of God being the creator of all things, understand these challenges to be put in place by God for our benefit and growth. But even without a sense of God, we can see our challenges as opportunities for learning. We all know the saying “That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” Whether it is said as a quick pithy comment, or as a part of theological treatise, it is probably the most standard answer to the problem of evil in our culture. What appears to be evil actually is an opportunity for growth and deepening; our task is to figure out how to learn from it.

Another major concept of evil rooted in Christian theology is evil as original sin. The Biblical moment of this, of course is the moment in the garden of Eden when Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. Subsequently all of humanity was born into a sinful nature. Evil is just a part of who we are. It’s pretty harsh theology.
But there are modern variations as well. How about the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or simply the idea that humans have a certain amount of greed within them, and sometimes that greed wins out over the goodness. With nearly seven billion people in the world, the greed that rests in their hearts accounts for a pretty fat chunk of evil. Maybe evil is something that we act on as humans. That’s the second answer to the problem of evil. It comes from us.

There’s another answer for the problem of evil that’s a little more complicated. But I find it pretty compelling, so I want to talk about it for a minute. It’s a view that comes out of process theology. Although it’s mostly a Christian concept, it can fit in with many different views. The basic idea is that as the world continues in its process of creation, more and more goodness is made possible. Process theologians talk about harmony and diversity being the good or the goal of creation. So as we get more and more harmony and diversity created in the universe, we get more and more potential for evil created along with it.
It’s pretty easy to think of in terms of human development. As we grow in knowledge, technology empowers us to impart tremendous good on our world. But at the same time, that technology contains within it tremendous potential for evil. Much of it we see in environmental degradation and weapons production. So, as there is more good, there is more potential for bad. It’s like a physics equation. For you physics geeks out there, it’s like potential energy. As something is raised in the air, it’s potential energy increases. As the amount of good increases in the universe, so does the potential for evil. It’s all a balancing act this good and evil business.

So far we have heard from the major Christian answers to the problem, or at least my interpretation of them. But eastern religions also offer some helpful insight.

Buddhism deals heavily with the idea of suffering. Suffering is what everyone experiences throughout our lives, and the primary task of our religious life is to acknowledge and transcend that suffering. The cause of human suffering isn’t a universal force called evil, or some imbedded sinful human nature. The source of suffering is our misunderstanding of who we are as individuals. When we think of ourselves as isolated individual beings, we suffer. But when let our sense of self dissolve into a wider compassion, then we can transcend suffering. For Buddhists, there is no specific core source of evil. The confusion that we humans seem to be under is a source of suffering.

Similarly Hinduism doesn’t typically uphold a particular source of evil. But there they do have something we might learn from. As you probably know Hinduism celebrates an array of gods and goddesses. One of the most important of them is Shiva, the destroyer. Shiva is a major deity, definitely in the top five. And Shiva is especially helpful in our discussion of evil because he helps us to know that destruction and decay are also necessary parts of existence. What we often see as evil: death, decay, hatred, destruction, these are all a part of the universe and part of our human experience. Rather than rejecting these hard realities and calling them evil, many Hindus celebrate them in one of their most significant gods. Perhaps we should do what we can to learn from them.

Finally I want to mention an atheist perspective on the problem of evil. They would probably say evil does not exist as a force within the universe or a force within human hearts. Rather good things and bad things happen in the world. We humans are capable of doing tremendously good things and tremendously bad things. Our only response to the “evil” in the world is to improve ourselves and to make life better for each other as we can. Further, the use of the world evil can be distracting. Saying “the devil made me do it” chips away at our responsibility for our own actions.

So there you have it, a long list of how some people have answered the question of evil. It’s a learning opportunity, it rests in human failings, it’s the flip side of creation, it’s a necessary part of creation… Hopefully some of what you have heard up to this point makes some sense. But this still doesn’t tell us how we as Unitarian Universalists answer the age-old question. I can’t say that today I have a perfectly concise UU explanation. I can’t give you a concise Unitarian Universalist answer, but there are some important pieces of it that I am fairly certain of.

It may be easier to start with what evil is not. First, Evil is not a punishment. It is not a cosmic punishment like lightning bolts shot down from on high. To suggest that bad things happen to bad people ignores the incomprehensible suffering endured by innocent people every day. To suggest that people have somehow earned the hardships that they endure, especially in the case of children makes no sense. Blaming the victim will not do as an explanation.

Evil is not a punishment from on high, and it is not a cosmic obstacle course. It is true that we can learn from our challenges, and that we make what we can out of the lives we are given. However, assuming that God put those tremendous stumbling blocks in place to teach a lesson just doesn’t seem right. Sure, maybe in the case of minor challenges that we face. Even major illnesses could be seen as a teachable moment. But what about genocide and famine. Believing that those unspeakable things were created by a God to teach us a lesson is maniacal. Besides, who would want to worship a God who did create such pain and suffering. Evil is not a punishment from on high and it is not an obstacle course laid before us.

I also want to be clear that evil is not what some people are. Yes, there are evil actions, there are things that each of us occasionally do that are destructive or vengeful. In a variety of ways we make actions that are bad. We do evil acts, but we as people are not evil. No person is inherently evil. They may be sociopathic, they may do bad destructive things, but no person is inherently evil.

The last and most important thing I want to say about the way we deal with evil is that we have the power to resist it, and we should. This was the biggest point of Unitarianism’s beginning as a separate religious tradition. This is why at Harvard Divinity School in the early 1800s liberal religious thinkers began to call themselves Unitarians. While mainstream Christians preached that humans were inherently sinful and could be saved only through the grace of God, Unitarians knew that we were better than that.

Unitarians believed, and we believe today in the capacity for reason and moral development within each person. We are not depraved, we are not saints either. But, we have a choice. It’s a choice that we make every day over and over again. Each person, each one of us has the ability and the responsibility to confront evil in our lives. We have the power to stand up against systems of oppression. Even if our voice is small, we are called to stand with others who share our passion. We have a power and responsibility to stand up against evil in our world. And we struggle in a day-to-day basis to do the right thing. As I just said we are not depraved, but neither are we saints. You and I and everyone we know occasionally does things that we know are not the best. Whether it is motivated by fear, greed or lust, each one of us has to make choices in our own lives about how we will respond to temptations toward the bad. The bottom line is, we each have a choice in what we do.

One of the questions from the question box a couple of weeks ago was about the book of Job and what the Unitarian Universalist response was to that story. I hope the writer of that question is here. The remarkable thing about Job is that after the tremendous heaping piles of pain and suffering that he endured, he remained with the question, why me? He didn’t give up in the face of evil. He didn’t offer a quick and easy answer. And that’s what I’m asking of us for the month. That we sit with some discomfort and continue together to ask the question why? Maybe we will find an answer, maybe we won’t. But I do know that in the process we can encourage one another to resist evil where we see it.

Amen.

Sermon - "No is Not a Dirty Word"

2011-01-31T09:42:00.001-08:00

“No” is not a dirty word. In fact I have referred to saying “no” as a spiritual practice, one that some of us could learn deeply from. I mean that seriously. For some of us, saying “no” is a spiritual discipline. It’s something that we should be doing to deepen our sense of self and to improve our relationship with creation.

I know it sounds strange to say that religiously, we should say “no” sometimes. Especially when we so often focus on openness and affirmation and giving. That sense of openness and giving is pretty much the core of Unitarian Universalist theology.

But, theology never happens in a vacuum. It always comes from a particular person, or people, and it is always directed to a particular person. Theology should respond to the needs of the person hearing it. And our needs vary pretty significantly from one person to the next. Even from one moment to the next, what we need to hear in life can be very, very different.

The vast majority of theology within our tradition as Unitarian Universalists, and the theologies that we draw on emphasize the role of compassion and giving in our lives. They are based in a sort of openness and connection. Whether it is our Christian heritage, Buddhism, Paganism, or our shared ethics as human beings, we usually dwell on the responsibility to give more freely of ourselves.

That’s all well and good. I know it’s a message that I could use more of on occasion. But some feminist theologians have raised a question about this theology. They have wondered exactly who this message of giving more of yourself is written for.
Are we telling disempowered women that they should be more compassionate and be MORE giving? Are we telling underpaid laborers and disadvantaged people of color that their real spiritual quest is to learn how to give more freely of themselves? Should abuse spouses be more generous? Should we telling the disempowered to give more?

No. That would be foolish.

We heard in our responsive reading earlier today, that there is a season for every thing. A time to be born, a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing… and of course there is, a time to say yes, and a time to say No.

That raises the obvious question, when is that time. Do you have to be a member of an oppressed group? Do you have to be abused or unappreciated? Well, not exactly. Here are a few rules of thumb about when to say “no”.

First we should be clear that, “no” is not be your first response, either spoken or thought. This is a sermon about drawing reasonable boundaries, not about shutting out the world. I think it is deeply important to live our lives with a sense of openness and opportunity. Just two weeks ago I spoke about the discipline required to live in a state of hope. With all the world around you ready to say no, let it be our goal to greet new opportunities and ideas with the a positive intention.

But sometimes, we realize that giving of our time or our energy doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel fair. I think one of the most important times to say no is when saying yes builds up resentment of another person. This happens in all sorts of different ways. In very mundane ways, it could happen when we always give in to what our partner wants to eat for dinner. Too many “yes Dears” is likely to end up in a pretty heated discussion. If you really do mind, then say something. But it can also happen in more significant ways. One of them that I want to be sure to talk about, is in giving our time to our community, our Fellowship. We ask a lot of our members, and most of the people in our community are incredibly generous with both their time and their money. It is deeply appreciated, and hopefully it feels like a good investment of both.

But I do not want you to resent your church. I don’t want anyone to resent the number of hours they spend on a project or the physical effort something takes, or the money they give. Certainly it may give us a little pause, we may even joke a little about all that we do. But if there is any serious resentment about how much you give, if your giving of time makes you question your relationship with the Fellowship, then by all means stop, or at least cut back a little. When you begin to resent your giving, it is time to say no. Whether it is with this Fellowship, your family, your work, or any other venue. Giving should be what you do willingly. If it is done with resentment, then no one wins.

My final rule of thumb, is that we should say “no” when saying yes is actually harmful. Who wants to end up like the “Giving Tree” after all. That is exactly the type of scenario that this sermon is about. What happened to the giving tree was completely destructive to the tree. There was literally nothing left of her at the end of the story. Her generosity destroyed her as a person.
And her generosity was destructive in another way. The boy in this story never learned in ways that he could have. Just imagine if the tree had encouraged the boy to plant other apple trees rather than giving all that she had. Imagine if the tree had said no, because I love you and want you to learn more sustainable ways of being relationships. Saying yes wasn’t just harmful to her, it was also harmful to the person that she loved.

Just like the tree, we are called to say no when what is asked of us is harmful to ourselves or to the person asking. We’ll get into the theology of it later. But from the most basic idea, sometimes saying “no” to someone we care about, is necessary for our own basic well-being or for theirs.

So just to recap the rules of thumb about when to say “no”. It shouldn’t be the first thing, but that doesn’t mean it is never said. Second, we need to say no when saying yes builds resentment in our hearts. And finally, we need to say “no” when saying yes is actually harmful.

But we can also couch this in terms of our faith. I said earlier that our faith tradition typically leads us to a sense of openness and sharing. It’s hopefully our initial response to things.
If you were here last week, you know that I did a “question box sermon.” I answered questions that people wrote down on pieces of paper. I was largely satisfied with the answers that I gave. But there was one that I knew by the afternoon was inadequate. The question was about how Unitarian Universalists are called to respond to fundamentalist religions, be they Christian or Muslim or any other. My initial reaction, and what I think the gut instinct of our traditions, was to say that we should listen, truly listen to the world view that they are coming from. And that was a theologically diverse tradition, we have something fairly unique to offer in the venue of inter-religious dialog.

I stand by that idea of listening, but it’s not quite enough. We also are called to say “no” on occasion. That’s right, our listening and our acceptance of other cultures and traditions has boundaries. When religious traditions dehumanize people or sanctions violence, we are called to stand up and say No. Just this past week, a gay-rights activist in Uganda was beaten to death in his own home after a local paper published the names and addresses of gay people in the community, and suggesting that they should be hanged. This violence was a part of religion. And we are called to stand and speak against it. Just as people of good conscience throughout history have stood up to say that religious persecution is not okay.

Obviously, we in this room do not face immediate danger because of our religious beliefs. We fortunately live in a country where our religious liberty and right to political speech are pretty safely guarded. This example of when to say no may seem extreme and obvious, but there is a point. The gut reaction from our Unitarian Universalist principles is openness and acceptance. We aim to hear the other out, as a religious value. But those same religious values tell us that we MUST stand up and say no on occasion. According to our own principles, there is a time for openness, acceptance and giving, and there is a time to say no.

We usually talk about these principles providing a sense of openness and giving, but that isn’t always the case. Our first principle is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We remember that one pretty easily and quickly. And we acknowledge that everyone has worth, even those most in need. But today I want to remind us that EVERYONE includes yourself. You have your own inherent worth and dignity to respect. Sometimes we disrespect ourselves when we just agree to everything that is asked of us. Sometimes saying “no” is necessary to respect our own dignity.

And there are other principles that we hold that speak to the issue. Can someone tell me what the second of our principles… without looking? It is
Justice Equity and Compassion in human relationships. Justice and Equity both depend on knowing some limits, knowing when to say “no.” The story of the giving tree was nowhere near just or equitable. relationship I think at first glance we call it compassionate. But was the boy able to grow in compassion at all? Sure the tree was compassionate in her giving, but her giving wasn’t met with anything resembling reciprocity. Sometimes Justice and Equity mean saying no.

Okay, someone give me the fifth principle…. It is the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations and in society at large. The use of the democratic process can be a tricky thing for us to understand sometimes. We get the first part of it, that everyone gets a vote. We celebrate that quite well. But the other part is that everyone gets only one vote. That’s right, one vote per person. No matter how much of a fuss any individual raises, no matter how deeply held his or her convictions are, they get only one vote. It is up to the community to decided together, in an equal manner how it will govern itself. And a democratic community in turn says “no” to a smaller group who disagrees with the result of a vote. Functional democracy is about the ability to say no, in a way that is not dismissive or oppressive or rude, but still saying no to some people when the final decision has been made.

And the last principle, the one that we know and perhaps encapsulates UU theology most completely… respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This finale principle, the one that guides so much of how we live as a religious community is all about recognizing our relationships. It is taking seriously the lyrics of the song that we sing every Sunday: “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share and from this we live.” To sustain our relationships in a loving way, we should build them without resentment. And to be able to have long-term relationships, sustainable relationships, we can’t give ourselves completely away, or like the giving tree, eventually, there will be nothing left of us to give.

Everyone has their limit, and the limit is different for each person. Some people are able to give in ways that baffle me, and to do it for a long time. But we all have a limit to our patience. I’m reminded of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers at the temple. This was the only action remotely resembling physical violence that Jesus engaged in. I’m not totally clear about the details of the money-changers. But the way I understand it, the money-changers or bankers were there to make correct change for of the pilgrims who had come to pay the required half shekel as an offering at the temple, but essentially ripping them off in the process. Seeing people making money by ripping off faithful pilgrims put Jesus over the edge. He said clearly, no more of this. “Not in my house,” he said.

The last example of saying no that I want to leave you with is perhaps the most useful to our diverse lives. The Buddha found limits in a different way, perhaps the best way I can think of for us as a model. He always advocated for the middle way. In a nut-shell, he left a life of opulence as a prince, to live life as an ascetic holy man. Finally he realized that both these extreme lifestyles were a barrier to becoming his best self, and he took care of himself, so that he could take care of others. Totally selfish greed wasn’t the way, but neither was a total rejection of his own needs. There was a balance to be struck, a middle way. That’s hat I hope for us, to find in each of our lives the sacred balance, a time to say yes, and a time to say “no.” Because it is not a dirty word. In fact it is a necessary word if we are to live out our principles in this world.

Amen.

Sermon - "A Heart Felt Faith"

2011-01-17T14:31:00.000-08:00

A Heart Felt Faith

Dr. Martin Luther King’s most famous speech has to be the amazing “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It may be because of the magnitude of the gathering that this speech has become the hallmark of Dr. King’s legacy. But there seems to be something more to it. It was this particular speech in which Dr. King had the audacity to dream of a world that was fundamentally better, a world where the tables had turned. It was a world some believed could come into being only after revolutionary change had occurred.

What was remarkable about Dr. King and what I want to focus on today is his audacity to have such a bold dream. Not only did he hold room for this dream in his heart, he shared that dream, idealistic and naïve as it sounded, he shared it publicly with the entire world.

His dream wasn’t a specific blue print. It was simply an insistence that things can and should be better. You see that’s the whole point of a dream. It’s not a plan, it’s simply naming the goal. It’s not a how to, but a vision.

We can learn from Dr. King’s insistence on a dream. Rather than feeling overwhelmed like many of us do, saying “Where do we start? I can’t do everything.” Rather than losing footing in the mess of problems that we see before us, we can hold fast to a vision, a dream. It doesn’t have to be a step-by-step plan. A simple dream will do just fine. Remember the dreams that he spoke of.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

All men are created equal, sitting together at the table of brotherhood, people being judged by the content of their character. This is the language of dreams. This is the language of a revolutionary change. This is a dream that King knew, and we still know is a long ways off. It’s a dream that’s nearly impossible, which is the only type of dream worth fighting for.

The struggles that Dr. King and the civil rights movement faced are difficult for me to wrap my head around. The story from earlier felt almost too violent to tell our own children. The challenges that they faced were tremendous, and still the challenges that we face in making our world a more peaceful place, and an ecologically healthy place can be completely overwhelming. But every leader that I admire has realized and insisted, that we can be better. Our dreams may be far, far away, and the path to them unclear. But one thing is for sure, we can be better.

We can be better and we have all the resources we need at our fingertips. Everything we need to enrich our souls and care for our world. We are giving tremendous gifts. We sit nestled in a creation overflowing with all that is necessary for life. And earth that heated by the sun is delicately balanced to spew forth life. We are given logic and passion and all the gifts of the human spirit. We have been given the power of love. We have been given the power of community. We bask in a deep pool of potential. There is no reason to argue with the fact that WE can do better, as long as we remember that it is possible.

Most religious traditions are joined together in a way that we are not. They have a common object of veneration. Whether it is God, or Vishnu or Allah, or a set of commonly held truths about the universe. Without such a unifying focus we face a pretty big challenge. And on occasion, we Unitarian Universalists supplant our faith in God for faith in this community or in our institutions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this tradition. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist and it informs every part of my being. And I am growing to love this little congregation in ways that I never understood as possible. Heck, I even have a flaming chalice tattoo. But, This institution is NOT the goal, it is not the dream. It is simply a means to get to that dream.

When we come together in worship, if we spend that time worshiping ourselves, and the institution that we build, well that’s pretty twisted. There must be something greater, some broader dream that drives this community, some reason for our being. Community is wonderful and our Fellowship is wonderful, but it is a means to an end. Naming that end can be a little difficult sometimes, but it is out there.

I have attended workshops on the subject and been a part of a few endeavors. From what I have seen, it’s very, very difficult for a church to write a mission statement. Most of us find it nearly impossible to summarize in a few words why we exist, not what we do, but why we exist. Why invest time and energy into building this thing. What need does it fill in the world?
We can very easily name some of the things that we do as a religious community. We have worship services, we do social justice work, we do pastoral care, we do all of these things. But why do we exist?

I think we exist to provide sanctuary and to create a more just, peaceful and loving world. And we do both of those things at the same time.

I want to talk briefly about what it means for us to be a sanctuary. We are in the business of being a safe place. A safe place for broken hearts, a safe place for outcasts, a safe place for people of all ages. Last year I spoke about our congregation being a butterfly sanctuary, a place where we could come and be safe, as we make the vulnerable and sometimes scary transform into magnificently beautiful selves. We exist to be a sanctuary for people in their times of need.

We aim to be a sanctuary for those who need a safe place. And we also aim to be a sanctuary for each other’s dreams. In a world that is quick to say “no”, and is more interested in a bottom line than what rests at the bottom of your heart, we create a place that we can nurture one another’s hopes and dreams. We build a sanctuary for hope.

I recently read from one a UU theologian that “Human beings often need sanctuary. But so does the Spirit.” (A House for Hope)P. 148 This caught my attention. We are quite aware of the needs of individual people. But we also offer sanctuary in a different way. We offer sanctuary to the spirit, the divine, our highest ideals, the ineffable source of life, whatever you want to call it, we make room for it here, we welcome it, we celebrate it.

Too often in religious life we speak so highly of those ideals and of the divine, as if they don’t need our help and encouragement in the world. But just like our downtrodden brothers and sisters who come here for a moment of support and peace, so to the spirit of life and love needs the support of a community, this community. “Human beings often need sanctuary. But so does the spirit. “

So we are here to be a sanctuary, and we are here to make a more just, peaceful and loving world. What’s remarkable is that we accomplish those two things at the same time.

As I shared with you in the opening words, King said that “One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we week but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” He understood that there can be no division between the goals that we have for the wider world, and the methods that we use to move toward those goals. They are one in the same. As we create the beloved community here, we bring it about in the wider world. And as we struggle for justice for all people, we deepen our relationships with one another. The method and the goal are the same thing. Peace is both a dream and a practice. Building the beloved community is both our dream for the wider world, and our practice of offering sanctuary in this Fellowship.

One of my most striking moments of ministry happened not too long ago, many of you were here. It happened when Tom McGrew stood here and told us about his commitment to this Fellowship. I think it was probably a fundraising pitch, during the pledge campaign. What I heard was way more important than a passionate ask for money. And I tell this story not to toot a horn or ask for more money. I tell it because it cuts to the heart of who we are as a Fellowship.

Tom was describing why this church was important to him, why he chose this place to support with his time and his money. And he said that he feels like it makes him a better person. Not in a self-righteous way, like “I go to church, I’m better than you.” Not like that, but in a way that causes him to pause and think about his words and his actions. In a way that he feels encouraged and inspired to follow his conscience more fully. He said that UUFLB impacts his life, he said that WE impact his life in a positive way.

Hearing this is a very sobering moment for a minister, and I hope that it is a sobering moment for you as a congregation. What we do here, building this sanctuary impacts people in real ways and makes them better people out in the world. Building a sanctuary helps not just those that seek its shelter. Building a sanctuary helps a world in need.
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Our Dreams

I spoke earlier about Dr. King’s willingness and bravery to hold a dream. And I spoke about the role of this congregation as a sanctuary for dreams. We can be better, we have everything we need at our fingertips. We can be better to each other and we can build a better world as long as we remember that we have a dream to strive for. But I’m curious. What is your dream? I’m curious, and I think other people need to hear this as well. In one or two words what do you want for our world? Not just for yourself or for this church, what do you want for the world? Yell it out. Don’t whisper it, don’t say it. Yell is aloud so we can feel it.

…

Let us be about the business of making our dreams a reality. Les us never forget the dreams of others in this room. More importantly let us never forget our own dreams for a better world.

Sermon - "Blessed are the Meek"

2011-01-10T10:38:00.001-08:00

Blessed are the Meek

I learned something in college. Like many of the important lessons of college this happened outside of the classroom and outside of books. This was a sort of personal adventure.

In college I was just coming out, and just coming to understand what it meant for me to be gay. It was a big time for growth that way. So my freshman year I decided I would check out the GLBT student organization. The first time I went I was so frustrated that I didn’t return the rest of that year. They had a guest speaker. He was a local activist and small business owner. He told the group something I found disturbing. He said that he experienced everything in his life as a gay man. From going to the grocery store to driving down the street. As a business person he understood his business to be gay and every thing that he did or was was a part of being gay.

Well I thought this was absurd, and on the verge of offensive. After all, I was just the same as everyone else in the world. I just happened to be attracted to other men. That was it. That was the extent to the meaning of this small detail of my life. How strange for him to think that EVERYTHING he did or was was somehow gay.

But that first year of college something changed. As I become more comfortable being myself, I came to understand what this guest speaker had meant. It wasn’t that everything I said or did was a direct reflection of my sexuality. It’s more nuanced than that. He meant that everything that I experienced and learned, came through my experience of being in the world in a certain way. He, and I experienced our world as gay men.

The best way I can describe it is sort of like a mask. A couple of weeks ago, in our Weaving the Fabric of Diversity workshop, we made masks of our personal identity. We wrote and drew symbols of all of the pieces of ourselves. I wrote that I was a gay white man, a minister, an able-bodied 32yo, and several other details. And everyone wrote about their own identity on their own mask. Now obviously, some of those things are the things that we see on the surface of other people. It is the mask that we wear when we interact with the world. Some of those things are hidden and some are seen, but the pieces of our identity shape how people see us.

But there’s more to the mask than that. These masks were a really helpful metaphor because not only do outsiders see a mask on our faces. The mask that we wear shapes the way that we see our world. We look through all of those details of identity and experience like a telescope with multiple lenses. And those lenses shape the way that we understand the world.

Incidentally, that speaker that I found so strange my freshman year became someone I deeply respected by the time I finished college. And that organization that I wouldn’t attend for an entire year, well eventually I came to lead it. It just took a while to get comfortable enough in my own skin to understand that I interpret the world in a particular way based on my particular experience.

This different perspective is something that people have been talking about for a long time, especially the perspective of those who are outside of the mainstream or those whose voices have been ignored or oppressed. There are several ways in which the oppressed have a different understanding of the world around them. Marxists, feminists, liberation theologians, a whole range of people talk about the phenomenon. But before we dive into that heavier material. I want to talk about an example of this that some of you may have seen before.

I have an unfortunate affinity for reality TV these days. One of the shows I have seen a couple of times is called “Undercover Boss.” You may have heard of it. The premise of the show is that in every episode the CEO or owner of a large company dresses up as a new employee. The camera crew then follows this undercover CEO as he or she tries to work in different entry-level positions in the company. Without fail, the boss has a life changing experience. Some affirmations are gathered, but also some very hard lessons are learned about the way people are treated in the company. I have only seen the show a few times, but from what I have seen, there are always tears shed, as the boss, the person in power comes to realize what life is really like in the world that he or she controls.
What’s more, that boss takes the information from employees and the new perspective to IMPROVE the company. You see the people on the ground are the one’s with the important information. The people doing the hard work, the work that is usually overlooked, they are the ones with the insight about how the company might be better.

Well, just like undercover boss, some of the most influential people in history have tried to explaining the exact same phenomenon, the fact that the people on the ground, the people doing the work have a different, and often better insight about the way things should be. It is the core argument within Marxism. Karl Marx said that the working class has a particular experience and understanding of the world. And eventually the working class will advocate for and achieve a society in which material resources are distributed in an equitable way.

And other groups have focused on the power of perspective. It’s a core belief for most feminists. They argue, and who would disagree, that not only are women intellectually equal to men. But also, because of their experience as women, they bring unique insights to the table. Their voices that are often ignored should especially be lifted up and recognized as a new, life-affirming alternatives to the male dominated discussion.

And similar arguments are made about the perspectives of people of color and people with disabilities. The bottom line is, our unique experiences in the world shape our understanding. And often, those voices that are most shut out of the conversation, are precisely the voices that hold the clearest perspective and offer the best solutions.

This idea of the masks that we see through, and the insights of marginalized people is where my mind goes when I hear the Beatitudes. We read them earlier together. “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who mourn, Blessed are those who hunger. Blessed are the peacemakers.” These words are likely familiar to us all, if not from religious life, then from popular culture and films.

The Beatitudes are a set of eight blessings. The language is a little bizarre, but they come at a very important point in the Bible. They are actually the opening lines of the Sermon on the Mount, which is understood as the most authoritative summation of Jesus’ moral teachings. These eight rather strange blessings are set at the pinnacle of Biblical authority. It’s like the Preamble of the constitution. It’s the piece of writing that we are familiar with even if we don’t know much else.

Because of their prominent place in the Bible, and also probably because they come across as so jarring, the Beatitudes have been interpreted, criticized, and reinterpreted by an endless number of Christian theologians. Many people rail against this passage claiming that is reinforces slavery mentality. While other social justice leaders point to the Beatitudes as a message about supporting those most in need.

And like everything else, it has been spun to mean a huge variety of things. I was a little shocked to hear that the “Blessed are the peacemakers,” line was actually used to Augustine in his “just war” theory, the idea that some wars could be morally justified. Apparently because the passage speaks of “peacemakers” rather than pacifists Jesus would agree with some wars. I’d certainly call that a stretch.

But like I said, I interpret this well-known passage through the ideas that I spoke of earlier. The idea that our particular identity and life experience opens each of us to particular insights. Perhaps the poor, the oppressed, the meek have a unique perspective to offer the rest of us. Perhaps we are called not to just to feed or fix them, but to listen to them.

This idea of unique insights coming from a place of meekness is not drawn out of the blue, and it’s not unique to this passage, or to Jesus, or to Christianity for that matter. Remember Moses, the archetypal prophet of the Hebrew Bible. When did he find his spirituality and redefine his role in the world? His life changed only after he left the palace of the Pharaoh and returned to a simpler life in the desert. Only from that perspective of living with the enslaved Israelites could he learn what he needed to learn to lead God’s chosen people.

But like I said this idea isn’t unique to Christianity or Judaism. The Buddha had a strikingly similar experience to Moses in this sense. If we know anything about the life of the Buddha, it is that he was born and raised in a palace. His father surrounded him with a perfect world, totally absent of pain and suffering. Until one day the Buddha journeyed outside the walls of the palace to the real world. There he began to see the challenges of the real world. And only after he left the palace, after he left behind all the power and opulence that is father’s wealth had to offer, only then could he face the challenges of life and become enlightened.

Each person, whether a great religious leader or the person on the street corner, each person has their own perspective of the world. It is shaped by identity and experience. And often those people we ignore most in the world, the people whose voices have been the quietest, the oppressed are the people that we need to listen most closely to.

This is why I am a fan of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. There are countless relief organizations out there. I believe that most of them do good work and intend well. But UUSC is particularly notable because it makes a practice of listening deeply to the communities it helps. Rather than dictating an answer to the problems that people face, UUSC supports the projects that people choose for themselves. Whether it is improved agriculture or women’s business development, each project is chosen and led by the people affected.

Today I decided to draw on a piece of Christian scripture, but the concept is far from unique to that tradition. As I said just about every justice struggle I know of has dealt with this concept. The marginalized have a particular experience and voice, and it’s one with tremendous insight. It’s a lesson that we as Unitarian Universalists could stand to take to heart.

If you have been around UU churches for long, you probably know that first of our seven Principles. WE believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. A simple read of that principle is very affirming. I have worth and dignity. It’s something that we sometimes forget. It’s very affirming. But the principle is a little bit broader than a message of self worth. Today, as we talk about the meek, the oppressed the marginalized, I want to remind us about the inherent worth and dignity of EVERY person. More than a self-affirmation, we can take our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person as a challenge, a big challenge. For the inherent worth and dignity of every person to become manifest in the world, some people who have had their voices heard, some of us, well we need to shut up and listen to a different perspective for a while.

We need to listen to the voices of those most affected by our decisions. What do women have to say about family reproductive choices? What do parents in inner cities have to say about failing education systems? What do the homeless have to say about their own needs and the efforts to provide shelter and food for everyone? What do same sex couples have to say about love and commitment? What do immigrants have to say about our broken system of laws and regulations?

As we go about the business of making our world a better place, let us pause to listen before offering our answer.

-Amen-

Sermon - God Is Not One Pt. 2

2010-12-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

God is Not One Pt. 2

This morning’s service is the second part of a two-part series. But don’t worry; you won’t be lost. Last week we learned about Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This we I’m going to talk about Hinduism, Buddhism and Atheism. See, it’s all new stuff.

This sermon comes largely from a recent book by Stephen Prothero called, “God is Not One.” He believes, and I tend to agree as I think about it more and more, that different religions are fundamentally different at their core. That’s not just because they believe different things. It’s more foundational than that. Different religions are different because they start from a different question, a different challenge of life, so obviously they will have a different answer.

In a way, comparing different religions is like comparing apples and oranges. They are fundamentally different things because they each respond to a different challenge. True, they respond to core challenges of human experience. But each religion is essentially asking a different question, solving a different problem. So to compare them, as if they all have the same goal is simply a mistake.

Last week I talked about these questions and proposed answers. Sin and salvation were the core problem and answer in the Christian tradition. In Islam, the central problem isn’t sin, but hubris, and the answer is submission. In fact, Islam means submission. Muslims are submitters who seek peace in this life and the next by surrendering themselves to the one true God. The problem posed in Judaism is exile, and the answer is return to relationship with God, and return to a true home. The path to that return is an interweave of narrative law. That’s right, for Judaism the answer is not so much about something that we should believe, but about something that we should do. It’s very different in that way. So today, I will follow that same track, first describing the core challenge or question that the tradition faces, and then the answer that they offer.

Before diving into the question and answer, the theology of Hinduims if you will, we first need to get a little bit of its vibe. When we think about Hinduism, I want you to think big. Think Bollywood films. Hinduism is BIG in every way imaginable.
It is the third largest world religion today with 900 million followers, about 15 percent of the worlds population. It is also the oldest of the major traditions, dating back at least as far as 2500 BCE. And it’s library of sacred texts is overwhelming. It’s oldest and most sacred text the Vedas, dates back to 1200 BCE. And the Mahabharata, contains 1.8 million words, dwarfing the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey combined. As outsiders, we may notice the extreme noise, color and fragrance of Indian temples. And devotees perform feats of pain and endurance beyond compare. Hinduism is BIG in every sense of the word. But perhaps most of all, Hinduism is big in all that it encompasses. It is without a doubt the most diverse world tradition. That is probably due to its very old age and its tendency to incorporate rather than reject new influences. So, more than any other tradition, please take what I have to say about Hinduism with a grain of salt.

Speaking in vast generalities, in Hinduism,the problem to be solved is samsara. Literally samsara means wondering or flowing by, but here we are talking about the cycle life, death, and rebirth, or what we know as reincarnation, over and over again. It’s an endless, and unsatisfying cycle, so the goal is moksha, or release. Moksha is spiritual liberation, freeing the soul from the endless cycle of samsara and reuniting with the eternal spirit of the universe.

There are two important pieces of Hinduism that I want to highlight. The first is Brahmanic Hinduism. Although it’s not the most popularly practiced, it is what Westerners mostly understand as Hinduism. Within the Barhmanic Hinduism we each have an eternal spirit, called Atman. This Atman, or spirit is ultimately indistinct from Brahman, the universal spirit. According to Hinduism, the goal of life is to recognize that simple fact that one’s own Spirit, or Atman is in fact the same as Brahman. The goal is to come to the realization that we are fundamentally one with each other and with the entire universe. And once we realize that interconnection, we escape the cycle of samsara and enjoy moksha. It is this truth that reminded me of our opening hymn. There’s a River Flowin in my Soul, and it’s tellin’ me that I’m somebody. There’s a River flowin’ in my soul.

But what Hindus do mostly is something completely different. They practice devotional worship to seek favor with their god. Hindus go on pilgrimages to sacred cities, rivers, and mountains, places associated with their chosen gods. They also observe a variety of festivals.

There are tons of opportunities to offer devotion to the god of your choice. But the central ritual for American Hindus and around the world is puja. Pujas are something like ancient priestly sacrifices, offering a gift to the gods. If these offerings are made in a temple they are typically lead by a priest. But they can also be given by ordinary people at a home or shrine, with oil lamps and incense sticks lit in front of an icon. The simple act of devotion is by far the most popular religious practice for Hindus.

Just last week, Kimberly LeMon lit our chalice, partly because she had studied sacred dance in the temples of India for two years. While she was there, as a gesture of hospitality some locals built for her an altar to Jesus. They assumed that because she was from American, she was Christian. The gesture seems a little strange from an American perspective. But hopefully we now see, that this is just how Hindus worship their gods. They build temples and shrines to venerate the god that inspires them. In so doing they may find favor with that god, or even better, be granted enlightenment and liberation from the endless cycle of reincarnation.

The next tradition that I want to talk about is Buddhism. It comes from a similar theological world-view, an endless cycle of reincarnation, but it takes a very different turn.
For Buddhists, the primary problem in life is suffering or dukkha. And the obvious goal is relief from that suffering. The final relief from suffering is called nirvana, which literally means blowing out. This is where one of the key differences comes into play. I described Hinduism’s moksha as a union between two eternal souls, the soul of the self and the soul of the universe. In Buddhism the goal is the opposite. The goal is to finally burn off all of one’s karma, a sort of soul residue, so that like a candle, your existence along with your suffering is extinguished.

The Buddha taught that life is suffering, or dissatisfation. Time and time again we don’t get what we want or the things that we love in our lives slip through our fingers. Life is suffering because of attachment. We get attached to material things that are fleeting. We also get attached to disappointments of the past, or anxieties of the future. We are attached to the way things could have been, or the way we didn’t quite make the mark that one time. We even get absorbed in how wonderful life used to be. We get attached to what is not here and now, and we long for a different experience. And thus we are dissatisfied.
The challenge within the Buddhist framework is to live in the present moment. Are you focused on the past or future, or maybe some other place? Or is you mind present in the here and now? That is the primary goal of Buddhist practice, to live in the present moment, free of attachments that only bring dissatisfaction. It’s a big challenge if you take it seriously.
That is where the practice of meditation comes in. Various methods of meditation work toward the goal of stilling the mind. We practiced one form of meditation earlier together, as we sat in silence and followed our breath to still our minds. Later in our closing hymn we will practice another form, called Metta. It’s a practice of extending compassion to the world, starting with ourselves and offering wider and wider circles.
Perhaps the most unique thing about Buddhism as a religion is its utterly disinterest in theological speculation. In fact it warns against it. One of the more popular stories is about a monk who comes to the Buddha with a litany of questions. He wants to know about the soul and death and reincarnation and the cycle of karma and a whole gamut of things that we might traditionally call religion.
The Buddha responds with a question of his own. He says, “If you were shot with an arrow, would you not first remove the arrow before seeking out who shot it or what kind of bow was used. So it is with the teachings of Buddhism. We should first aim at removing the suffering from our lives because that is a far more important than speculating about the theological reasons behind it.
Many religions claim to be a way of life more than a set of beliefs. But it is especially true to Buddhism. As a tradition that eschews theological speculation, some have questioned whether Buddhism is a religion at all. Is it really just a philosophy? Well defining what is and is not a religion can fill volumes. But I’ll leave it to you. Is Buddhism a religion?

I also raise that question because it’s on that many people raise about atheism. Is it a religion?
Following the problem and solution equation that we have used so far, atheism has a particular answer. For outspoken atheists, especially those who have published popular books recently, the human problem cannot be solved by religion because religion is the problem. The solution is to flush out this poison from our system. Several of you have read books by the New Atheists. In the past ten years several very popular books have come out with just that argument.
According to Richard Dawkins, “faith is one of the world’s greatest evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” According to Sam Harris, theology is “ignorance with wings.” According to Christopher Hitchens, organized religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
These atheist frequently pursue a straw man argument against religion, picking out the most radical and damaged branches of religion as an opportunity to condemn them all. But I think it’s important that we don’t do the same things in return. There is another kind of atheist, the kind that many of you are.
Unfortunately the author of “God is Not One” gives only minor recognition to this group. These are the atheists that do not believe in God. But more importantly, they believe that religious traditions, no matter what they are, should never lead us to demean or exclude, oppress or diminish anyone else, including those who believe in God. These later atheists, the kind that I think many of you are, simply don’t believe in God but don’t express the urgent need to make others agree with you. It’s very much a humanist approach, a belief that the health and wellbeing of people is more important than the religions to which they subscribe. Religion exists to serve humanity, not the other way around.

I want to close our time together addressing the unspoken question. Which of these traditions is best. Like I have explained, comparing religious traditions is a little like comparing apples and oranges. Each tradition aims to answer a different question or life challenge, so comparing them is extremely difficult.
But that doesn’t mean that all religion is good, or even that all religion is acceptable. Some of it is in fact very bad. As we read earlier together, it matters what we believe. Some beliefs build walls and separate us, while other beliefs open our minds and our hearts.
It is often misstated that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they want. As a Unitarian Universalist you can have a huge spectrum of different beliefs. But your belief must fall within two basic criteria. It has to make sense, and it has to make a difference. Your core values and religious principles must resonate with what seems true and reasonable to you. And your faith must make a difference; it must make you a better person in the world.
We have two standards within Unitarian Universalism. For the rest of religion, I set only one standard. Your faith must make a difference. Your religion must make you a better person. I don’t mean that it must make you believe in the same politics as me. It likely will not. But it must make you a more generous and compassionate person.
If we take it seriously, the role of faith is to transcend the self, and come more fully into community with our wider world. Each tradition has its own unique way of pulling our concerns beyond ourselves to care for a wider world. The theology involved comes in staggering variety, almost as much variety as the methods of practicing those various beliefs. But if any religion is worth its salt, it must make a difference. It must make its adherents more compassionate and generous people.

Every single faith tradition, including our own has the capacity to build up walls or to tear them down. Not all beliefs are equal. As people of faith, we are called to the difficult task of examining our own beliefs. Which ones make us more loving people, and which ones separate us. We are called to the difficult task of examining our own beliefs. And we are called to engage compassionately with others about their beliefs. And learn from one another in the process.

-Amen-