Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“The Tao that Can Be Named Is Not the Tao”
Rev. Rod Debs, pastor
April 10, 2011

As you may know, I will be taking a three-month Minister’s Sabbatical beginning May 1^st through July, followed by a month of professional preparation in August.  Minister’s Sabbaticals are for the purpose of rest and renewal.  Sabbaticals have been described as the “minister’s study writ large.” Many of the resources I draw upon as a minister, texts and computer internet, serve to expand my awareness beyond my personal understandings and experience and academic training.  Sabbaticals allow us to explore beyond the limits of the minister’s study.

On Sabbatical ministers often travel to different cultures to experience what cannot be read in books.  So in May, Jeannette and I, accompanied by Juanita will join a pilgrimage to Transylvania sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council.  The first Edict of Religious Toleration, in 1568, was enacted by Transylvania’s Diet of Torda.  There, Unitarianism was first named as a religious sect, and Unitarian Francis David, or more accurately David Ferenc declared, “We need not think alike to love alike.“ I hope to deliver greetings and pictures of this congregation as a way of saying “Thank You” for the heritage of religious freedom which spread from them to our own United States, the first nation in history explicitly founded without a state religion.

Transylvania’s Diet of Torda declared, “in the matter of religion…, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied.” Our nation’s founders reflected this sentiment which they called “the right of conscience” and instituted it in the “establishment clause” of the First Ammendment .  In Transylvania, we will experience Unitarian congregations and villages in ways I could not, in the confines of my study.

Jeannette and I will also explore beyond our American cocoon by visiting several of the fifteen exchange students we have hosted over the years.  I suspect the children here will want to make a card for Ivanna in Ukraine, from their close relationship a year ago.

Although I have never been to India and only studied Hindu religions from text books, in recent months working out at the YMCA, I have gotten to know a retired civil engineer, a Hindu who goes by the nickname Kesh.  From his childhood in India, Kesh spoke of the brightly-colored clay images created almost weekly to a different god or goddess, each one of the “ten thousand faces of God.”

Christians of my childhood called Hindu images “idols,” and since my 2001 Sabbatical to Thailand, I have carefully explained that Buddhist images are not worshiped as idols.  The postures of the Buddha images, the hand positions, everything about the Buddha images communicate stories and moral instruction to the historically illiterate masses.  Buddhists don’t worship the images.  They are teaching tools.

Kesh surprised me by actually calling the clay images of Hindu gods and goddesses, “idols.”  At the end of the week’s rituals of prayers, offering of food, flowers and incense, the sacred images are put into the river to disolve.  Within a few days another god- or goddess-image is created and another colorful worship-ritual celebrated.

Kesh explained that Hindu people do not worship the “idol.”  They see through the “idol” to those divine moral qualities depicted by the image, moral qualities that transcend our human ability to communicate by words or other symbolic representations.  The god and goddess idols function to remind sometimes-illiterate Hindu people of their sacred stories, their Hindu morality tales (like the stories of Hebrew scriptures, and the parables of Jesus).  Hindus see through the idols in their ritual worship to that which cannot be said in words.

There is a Taoist saying, “Do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon.” Have you ever pointed at a ball and said to your dog, “Get the ball” or “Fetch”?  Maybe your dog is smarter than my dog, but my dog doesn’t look where I’m pointing.  He doesn’t even look at my finger unless I point dramatically.  He doesn’t know that the word-symbols I say, “Fetch the ball” mean anything more than “arf, arf, arf—look at me—arf, arf, arf.” At best, he might guess I want him to look at my finger.  He always “mistakes the pointing finger for the moon.” He doesn’t understand symbolic representation, that the words and the pointing finger refer to something else beyond themselves.

Sacred scriptures and teachings as well as religious symbols, art and icons, all of them are “fingers pointing at the moon.” To worship the words of scripture as if they are anything more than “fingers pointing at the moon,” is much like worshiping molten or graven images, forbidden in the very first of the Hebrew’s Ten Commandment.

The first great sin of religion is idolatry, to worship verbal and mental images as the ancients forbid the worship of graven and molten images.  Idolatry is the worship of the symbol, rather than seeing through the word images or art images to the moral wisdom to which they point.

Literalist Christians and atheists lock onto literal misinterpretations of religious texts and miss the entire wisdom of scripture.  Let me give an example:  The story in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew of Jesus walking on the sea, has greater significance than as a magical feat overcoming the laws of physics.  Storms at sea and flood waters were common literary symbols for overwhelming social chaos such as slavery, occupation or war.  To say that Jesus calmed the storm and could walk on the water rather than be engulfed and drown– in fact to say that Jesus could inspire Peter to walk on water too, was to communicate to common people of Israel, that Jesus’ way of life enabled him to rise above the social chaos of his day, and that his followers would be able to rise above the chaos of their lives as well.

To say that Jesus simply worked the miracles of walking on water and calming storms would be to trivialize the text, to miss the entire meaning of the words, to “mistake the pointing finger for the moon.” Atheist ridicule that no person can stop a storm or walk on water without a hidden log, is just as trivial a criticism of the text as the Christian literalist’s magical interpretation.  A more meaningful critique to engage is whether Jesus’ way of living can actually help people rise above the chaos of life.

The first great sin of religion is idolatry, to “mistake the pointing finger for the moon.” Although Hebrew, Christian, Muslim, Baha’i and various other related sects do not worship graven or molten images, they do tend to lock onto certain verbal and mental images of God, human metaphors that take on a concrete rigidity no less than graven and molten images.

Two thousand years ago, the metaphor of the powers experienced in life which made most sense to many ancient people under the influence of Egyptian pharaohs was that God is an almighty King or Judge.  When King David’s scribes compiled the Hebrew scriptures from oral traditions, the idea of an Almighty King or Judge must certainly have been the most powerful metaphor to symbolize their experience of reality.

A thousand years later, despite their expectation of an imperial Messiah, like King David, Messianic Jews who wrote the Gospels also recounted stories of Jesus that wholly contradict the image of a conquering King.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is said to have spoken of God as a loving Father.  The two metaphors for God, on the one hand a conquering King and Judge of imperial Jewish dreams, and, on the other, a loving Father who instructs that we love our enemies, and give to the poor, and who accepts all as children of God without exclusion, these opposing metaphors are used by the writers of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

The great sin of idolatry, the sin of literalist worship of religious texts and metaphors for life, for reality, for God, for The Way It Is—the great problem is that our metaphor is too limited for the reality to which it points.  We seldom look through the idol, we seldom look past the pointing finger to the amazing, unnamable reality beyond.  Each metaphor has its problems.  Each limits our conception of the reality of life.

Finally, we tend to become like our metaphor for God.  The Jesus Seminar scholar, John Dominic Crossan writes of the Bible’s imperial image of God as King and Judge:

“Yahweh is a God not of revenge but of justice… the right of all to equal dignity and integrity of life.  If, confronted with the blinding glory of God, all convert freely… to justice and righteousness, then all is well in our religious imagination.  But if we await a divine slaughter…, then we are the killer children of a Killer God.  Is your God a God of justice or of revenge?”

Our Universalist forbears interpreted the Almighty King and Judge as an All-Loving Father, decreeing that all God’s children will be judged acceptable, universal salvation.  Yet there is a problem with even this Father-God of Universal Love.  It’s the problem of evil.  How could an all-powerful, all-loving God allow the genocide, torture and grinding poverty and abuse for generations of adults and children?  What kind of a just and loving Father would allow the atrocities of life, both observed and unseen?

“Do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon.” Perhaps Western monotheists should learn from Hindu pluralists to discard our images of God, to drop them in the river after each worship ritual—to look through our metaphors to the unnamable, unfathomable, amazing realities of life that demand a posture and attitude of amazement, of humility and of gratitude.

We are the earth life-form that can use symbols with our brain’s temporal and frontal lobes using the symbolic representations of language and writing.  We are the earth naming what we experience.  Our names are not the reality we name.  “The tao that can be named in not the Tao.”

May we be humble.  May we explore the world with awe and wonder.  May we hold gratitude for the unfathomable gift of simply being here.  Now.  This breath.  This, I believe, is the religious posture:  awe, humility and gratitude.

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“How to Change the World”
Rev. Rod Debs
March 20, 2011

Story: “The Evil Wizard” by Joshua Searle-White (What If Nobody Forgave? by Colleen McDonald, 1999)

Have you ever known someone who would pick on you or your brother, your sister?  What did you do?  What would happen then?

This is the story of an Evil Wizard, and of a girl named Esmeralda.  Esmeralda is a pretty normal nine-year-old girl except that, for several years, she has been on adventures all around the world, saving all kinds of people and animals from the clutches of the Evil Wizard.  And the Evil Wizard is, well, evil.  He is totally and completely mean and rotten.  Once he stole a whole forest of animals and put them in cages in a cave underneath the ocean; Esmeralda had to save them.  Once the Evil Wizard stole a space-ship and went to the planet of the Hoodoo and tried to start a war there—he tried to get all the yellow-striped Hoodoos to kill the green-striped Hoodoos; Esmeralda had to stop him.  And once he went to Shangri-La where everybody is happy all the time and does nothing but ride merry-go-rounds and water-ski and eat chocolate; he tried to wreck the fun and make everyone miserable; Esmeralda had to catch him and put him in jail.

Esmeralda spent a lot of her time chasing the Evil Wizard around the world, into space, under the oceans, up the mountains, and she caught him every time.  But the Evil Wizard kept coming back.  As many times as Esmeralda stopped him from doing terrible things, he kept doing more.  As many times as she put him in jail, he kept breaking out.  It was very, very frustrating, but Esmeralda kept doing it because, after all, these creatures and people needed to be saved from him.

Then one day, Esmeralda decided to go on a trip of her own.  All her other adventures had started when the Evil Wizard had caused trouble somewhere, and Esmeralda had gone to help the poor victims. But this time was different. This time, she was going on an adventure all by herself.  It was a Saturday, and she was going to climb to the top of a mountain—a mountain she had wanted to climb for a long time.  She got her backpack, her magic hat, her binoculars, some food, and some extra socks, and she headed off along the trail.

As she walked along, she was enjoying the smells and the sun and the leaves on this summer day.  But she hadn’t been walking for ten minutes when whom should she see, sitting on the path ahead of her?  You guessed it: the Evil Wizard, dressed in his gloomy robe, grinning at her.  “What is he doing here?” she said to herself.  “I fight and fight and fight this guy, and every time that I think I finally have him put away, he’s back again.  I can’t believe it!” And just as she thought this, the Evil wizard darted off the path and into the forest.  She began running after him, thinking, “This is it.  This time, he is not getting away.  I’m going to catch him, and when I do, I’m going to put him where he will never come out again.  I don’t ever want to see his ugly face again.”

Esmeralda ran and ran, dodging trees, climbing up hills, jumping over streams, gaining on him, getting closer and closer.  Finally, as the Evil Wizard ran around an enormous boulder, Esmeralda climbed on top of it and jumped off, landing right on top of him.  He flailed around and tried to escape, but Esmeralda doesn’t lift weights for nothing, and he was caught.  And Esmeralda thought to herself, “This is finally it.  I’m going to put him where he will never get out.” She looked around, and right there, next to this boulder, was a hole in the ground.  She dragged the Evil Wizard over to the hole, and stuffed him in.  Then she looked around and spied a small rock underneath the boulder.  She kicked that rock out of the way, and the boulder rolled right over the hole, sealing the Evil Wizard in.

“Phew!” she gasped.  “He’s trapped now.  He’s never coming out.  And I am FREE!” Esmeralda turned and walked back to the trail, picked up her backpack, and started off again when she heard a sound behind her.  She stopped.  Slowly, she turned around… and there was the Evil Wizard, on top of a log, staring at her.  Esmeralda threw herself onto the ground, pounded her fists, and kicked her feet.  “That’s impossible!  You can’t be here,” she cried.  “How did you manage to escape again?” Then she thought, “I shouldn’t have just put him in a hole—I should have dropped him off a cliff and let him tumble onto the rocks.  I should have taken him to the ocean and let him get eaten by sharks!” And then she looked at the Evil Wizard.  He looked at the trail, and she looked at her watch.  And she realized that she’d spent most of the day, in fact, she had spent most of her life trying to conquer the Evil Wizard, and nearly forgotten about her climb up the mountain.

Esmeralda thought about that for a minute, and then she realized something else.  “Maybe trying to get rid of him isn’t the answer.  If I wait to go on my adventure until I get rid of him, I might never get anywhere.  Something has to change.”  “Okay, Evil Wizard,” she called out to him.  “This is it.  I’m going on this journey, and I’m not going to let you take over.  I won’t let you do anything evil, but I’m not taking off after you just because you decide to show up.  This is my adventure.  If you want to come along, okay, I’ll have to deal with you, but you’ll also have to deal with me.”

And Esmeralda took a deep breath, shouldered her backpack, and proceeded up the mountain.  And the Evil Wizard—well, he looked around, hopped off his log, and went after her; but she continued in the lead.

Message: The Persian poet Kahlil Gibran wrote of those who disagree:

“You are my brothers and sisters…, here as my companions along the path of light, and my aid in understanding the meaning of hidden Truth.

“I love you for your Truth, derived from your knowledge.  I respect it as a divine thing, for it is the deed of the spirit.

“Your Truth shall meet my Truth and blend together like the fragrance of flowers and become one whole and eternal Truth, perpetuating and living in the eternity of Love and Beauty.”

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) expressed this same liberal spirit toward disagreement, calling for a kind of civility when he wrote: “We must love them both – those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject.  For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.”

Unitarian Universalist congregations gather with an explicit covenant of civility.  We promise to affirm and promote the “right of conscience,” the right of each person to their integrity. Our covenant goes so far as to declare:  “Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision.  As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support” (UUA Bylaws).

This civility among people who disagree was first legislated in Transylvania (now Romania) under Unitarian King John Sigismund by the Diet of Torda in 1568.  The Edict of Religious Toleration of 1568, declared, in part: “… in the matter of religion… in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.  Therefore… no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone,… and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching, for faith is the gift of God…”

Liberal democracy is founded upon these principles of “the right of conscience” and the working out of public policies through representative government designed to serve “the general welfare” rather than the private interests of ideology, power or wealth.  Yet, we have seen a break-down in civility with hate-radio and TV opinion-reporters and evangelical religious and secular extremists.  Anti-theists claim that ridicule is required to address “religulous” ideas, and Tea Party activists shout down those with whom they disagree.

Incivility, fear and hate is nothing new.  In the 18th century, John Murray’s preaching of Universalism in the new United States was dangerous heresy to those convinced that God would damn most of humankind to hell.  Here is an account of how The Father of Universalism in America responded to incivility:

“While the Rev’d John Murray was delivering a discourse upon Universalism, some person threw a large stone at him.  It crashed through the window and fell upon the floor.  He picked up the stone, which weighed fourteen pounds, held it up to his audience and remarked to them, `Brethren, this is a solid and weighty argument, but it is neither rational nor convincing.’” Murray continued—speaking with the royal `we’:

“We cannot persuade ourselves that scurrilous epithets are any more rational or convincing than weighty stones.  In spite of the severe visitations we have for nearly thirty years received, and which we are still receiving from professional brethren with whom we differ, we are yet of the opinion that logical reasoning is the best argument with which to disseminate truth.  Ridicule, misrepresentation, abuse, everything of the kind, may be used, but they are not argument.  They may, it is true, as they have done, hold the sway for the time being.  It is, however, only a question of time for truth to develop itself and enlighten humanity.” (Horace R. Streeter, Voice Building, 1871)

Universalist Hosea Ballou had this to say about evangelism:  “The law of heaven is love.” “Ministers who threaten death and destruction employ weapons of weakness. Argument and kindness are alone effectual, flavored by the principles of Divine love.”

I grew up within the Evangelical Christian world of revival preaching, outdoor camp meetings with benches and wood shavings under big tents, long altar calls with all six verses of “Just As I Am” (without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me)–all six verses repeated over and over again.  The guilt and fear was abusive—especially to children.  After college, I saved my money to study philosophy in graduate school so that I would be able to stand nose to nose with theologians and preachers and be more than an angry young man.  I wanted to know the Bible better than they did.  I wanted to get the monkey of a religion of fear and guilt off my back.

Today, I have occasional conversations, like the one last night at a wedding, in which I listened to a Methodist who is also a Mason, and shared with him some of what I share with you.  I distinguished between the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount who taught, “Love your enemies,” and the imperial conquering Christ as presented by the Messianic Jews who wrote the New Testament.  To ridicule Christianity whole cloth would be to throw the baby out with the bath-water.

To ridicule Islam of the Taliban or of the Saudis, to ridicule the Judaism of the Israeli military occupation and settlements would be as misguided as to ridicule Christianity as represented by Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, or the Third Reich.  Nor should we ridicule atheism based on the atrocities of Stalin or Mao Zedong.  There are healthy versions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and of atheism.  It takes open-hearted scholarship to distinguish the baby from the bathwater.  Anti-theists who accept an uncritical literalist interpretation of Scripture and reject it, are just as mistaken in their literalism as the evangelical who accepts literalist misreading of Scripture and believes.

John Murray said, “We are yet of the opinion that logical reasoning is the best argument with which to disseminate truth.  Ridicule, misrepresentation, abuse, everything of the kind, may be used, but they are not argument.”

Certainly it is easier to ridicule a person or their beliefs than to reason with dogmatic believers.  But we must not abandon reason for anything less.  The great danger of incivility is that, like Esmeralda chasing the Evil Wizard, we become like those we make our opponents.  We become ideologues with whom you cannot reason.

In his Autobiography, the elder statesman among our nation’s Founders, Benjamin Franklin wrote:  “Disputing, contradicting and confuting People. . . get Victory sometimes, but they never get Good Will, which would be of more use to them.”

Today we are witnessing people’s revolutions against autocratic governments in North Africa:  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain.  Last night a reporter for the BBC cited a study of the relative effectiveness of peaceful demonstrations and those that were attacked and turned to violence.  The peaceful demonstrations succeed.  It seems that the cycle of violence breeds violence.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”

Perhaps it is too easy for me to preach nonviolent resistance—work-stoppage, boycott, sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations from the ivory tower of relative peace and security in this country.  However, the cycle of violence is very real.  Violence breeds violence in return.  What can we do?

Perhaps we might clarify our goal.  Do we wish to control, to coerce? or to share influence?   Power politics of authoritarian control might involve violence rather than dialogue, indoctrination rather than education, coercion rather than reason.  If the goal is to share power with others for the common good, then dialogue, education, and nonviolent negotiation of differences are the means consistent with the ends.

The more we know about oppression in the world, especially of women, the more we see of tragedies and atrocities and the grinding destitution and disease around the world, the more we want to change the world, not by degrees, but now—no, yesterday.  We find ourselves willing to use any silver bullet, to turn the world toward justice.  We want more than influence; we want control to stop the suffering.

Paul Tillich wrote:  “The first duty of love is to listen.” Here at the Fellowship, we practice listening.  The Friendship Circles and Porch Swing discussion during Second Hour are where we practice listening around the circle.  Yes, we share when our turn comes around.  Yes, we sometimes find it hard to listen when we think we have something that justifies speaking out of turn.  But we are learning to listen 90% of the time when there are ten present.  “The first duty of love is to listen.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk from the Vietnam War era, advises:

“Though we all have the fear / and seeds of anger within us,
we must learn not to water those seeds, / and instead, nourish our positive qualities–
those of compassion, understanding, / and loving kindness.” –Thich Nhat Hanh

How do we change the world?  I am sorry to disappoint you by saying that you and I do not have the power to control the world and independently put an end to suffering and injustice.  Despite wishful thinking, we know this.

But our influence is far greater than we can imagine.  If we practice compassion, listening for understanding, loving-kindness that all humankind long for, both the just and the unjust, we influence the world.  If we learn to live our covenant of mutual trust and support, not only with those with whom we disagree here, but also with those with whom we disagree throughout the world, we can hold one another to a higher standard of compassion and justice by our modeled behavior.  Children are watching.

Piet Hein offers us this way to change the world: “If we want peace, the things we must accomplish to deserve it, are, first, to win each other’s trust, and second, to deserve it.” May we invest our energies in building mutual trust and support.

“Go out into the world in peace.  Have courage.
Hold on to what is good.
Return to no person evil for evil.
Strengthen the faint-hearted.  Support the weak.
Help the suffering.  Honor all beings.”

–Thessalonians, adapted

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“A Fragile Faith”
Rev. Rod Debs
March 13, 2011

Story for All Ages: “Muddy Children” by J. Grohsmeyer, A Lamp in Every Corner (2004)

Over two hundred years ago, in a small house in a small town, on the edge of a forest of very big trees in the state of New Hampshire, there lived a small boy.  His name was Hosea Ballou (1771-1852).

Hosea liked to learn and to do new things.  He was always asking questions, about what and why and how.  And, just like other children, Hosea liked to play.  He liked to play hide-and-seek with his nine older brothers and sisters.  In the winter, he liked to jump into snowdrifts.  In the summer, he liked to jump into the creek.  In the fall, he liked to jump into leaf piles.  And in the spring—Hosea’s favorite season of all—it would rain and rain and rain, and then Hosea could jump into mud.

Hosea loved mud.  He liked it when it was soft and squishy, and he liked it when it was thick and sticky.  He liked to jump in puddles with both feet and make the muddy water splash really high, and he loved to step in puddles v-e-r-y slowly, so that the mud oozed up between his toes.  Hosea loved mud.

Now, you can imagine that not everybody in his family liked mud quite as much as Hosea did.  His mother had died when he was not quite two, so his older sisters took care of him.  His sister who did laundry and scrubbed the family’s dirty clothes in big washtubs didn’t like having to scrub all that mud out of Hosea’s clothes after Hosea had stomped in a mud puddle.

His other sister who kept the younger children clean didn’t like having to scrub all that mud off Hosea.  Hosea didn’t like having baths either, especially when it meant he had to stand in a washtub in front of the fire and have water dumped over his head.  But his sisters loved him, so they took him home and washed him and gave him clean clothes.

Then Hosea’s sisters went to their father and said, “Father, please tell Hosea to stop playing in the mud.”   “Hosea,” said his father, very sternly, “you should not play in the mud.”     “Why?” asked Hosea, because asking questions was another thing he loved to do.     “Because,” said his father, who was one of the preachers in the Baptist church, “just as we try to live a good life and to be kind to other people, we try to stay clean.”    “Yes, father,” Hosea said, and after that day, he did indeed try to stay clean.

But it wasn’t easy.  He stopped stomping in the mud puddles on purpose and splashing muddy water everywhere, but sometimes the mud was just there.  Then he had to walk through the mud to get across the yard to gather the eggs from the chickens.  He had to walk in the mud to feed the pigs.  And sometimes, when he was already muddy from doing his chores, he played in the mud, just a little bit, and got even muddier.  His sisters, who loved him, took him home and washed his clothes, washed him and dressed him in clean clothes.

But Hosea’s sisters went to their father again and said, “Father, please tell Hosea to stop playing in the mud.”     “Hosea,” said his father even more sternly, “you must not play in the mud.”    “Yes, Father,” Hosea said.  He was sad, because he had truly tried not to get muddy, most of the time anyway.  “Are you very angry with me, Father?”     “I am disappointed in you, Hosea, and I am a little angry with you.”

Hosea hung his head and then he dared to look up, just a little, to ask, “Do you still love me?”     “Hosea,” said his father, and his father didn’t sound stern anymore.  “I will always love you, Hosea, no matter what you do.”    “Even if I get muddy again?”     “Yes.”     “Even if I get really, really muddy?”     “Yes.”     “Even if I get mud all the way up to my eyebrows and between my fingers and my toes and in my hair?”     “Even then,” his father said with a smile.  Then he added, very stern again, “But remember, Hosea.  You must try to stay clean.”     “I’ll remember, and I’ll try,” Hosea promised, and he did.  He stayed clean, most of the time anyway.

As he grew up, he stopped liking mud quite so much, but he still liked to ask questions about what and how and why.  “Father,” Hosea asked when he was a teenager, “how can it be that our church believes that God will let only one in a thousand people into heaven, even if many of those thousand people had good lives?”  His father didn’t have an answer for that question.

“Father,” Hosea asked, “if I had the power to create a living creature, and if I knew that the creature would have a miserable life, would suffer and die and then go to hell and be miserable forever, and I went ahead and created it anyway, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?  And would I be good or bad?”    His father didn’t have an answer for that question, either.

Hosea had to find his own answers.  So he read the Bible, a book with many stories about religious people and about God.  He went to some Universalist churches and asked more questions there.  At the age of nineteen, Hosea came to believe that God would let more than one in a thousand people into heaven.  He believed God would eventually let everyone into heaven, good and bad.

“How can you believe that?” asked his father.  “How can you believe that God would let bad people into heaven?”  (universal salvation)     “Because, Father, I remember what you told me when I was small.  I believe that even if God is disappointed in his children or a little angry with them, he will always love them and want them to be happy, no matter what they do, and no matter how muddy they are.”

Message: Margorie Montgomery wrote:  “Life is a gift for which we are grateful.  We gather in community to celebrate the glories and the mysteries of this great gift.” To be awake to the grace or giftedness of life is the religious posture of humility, of awe and gratitude.  A life of reality-based faith.

Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day” reads:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

This is what it means to be awake to the giftedness of life, to grace.  To pay attention with awe and humility and gratitude.

Fear, is something else.

When we get caught up in what feels like a deadly competition for power, wealth and knowledge, our lives are absorbed by that constant struggle to accumulate goods, services and intellectual resources that command goods and services.  William Wordsworth wrote:  “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” (“The world is too much with us”).

In his “History of the World: Part I,” Mel Brooks grins to the camera and declares:  “It’s good to be the king!” The king who monopolizes power, wealth and knowledge can command peasants to serve his every wish.  The history of Western religions is to conceive of freedom from fear through imperialism.  “It’s good to be the king!”

Extrapolate the king’s power, wealth and knowledge to infinity, and imagine yourself to be children or chosen subjects of the Almighty cosmic God-King.  Now that would be cosmic freedom from fear!  Cosmic consumer protection.

Based upon Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Baha’i theologies reflect two competing models of liberation from fear:  1) the imperial model and 2) grace.  The imperial model of King David took after the Egyptian empire:  monopolizing power, wealth and knowledge.  Judaism’s hopes for a Messiah in the likeness of the conquering King David were perpetuated by the Jewish followers of Jesus who projected on him the image of an imperial Messiah/Christ.  Christian Scriptures project on Jesus the prevalent Jewish expectations that the Messiah would be a conquering king who will return to destroy their enemies.

A second model of salvation from fear is seen in the stories of Moses, of the Hebrew prophets and in the life and teachings of Jesus.  Rather than imperial monopoly of power, wealth and knowledge, Moses shared power with the elders in the Hebrew “tent of meeting.” The Hebrew prophets called on Jews to share wealth with the poor, the widow, orphan and with “the stranger within your gate,” universal hospitality.  And Jesus, rather than destroying his enemies, taught:  “Love your enemies.” What an irony that Christian followers conceive of him as an almighty conqueror.

From the Hebrew prophets’ teachings of justice for the poor and oppressed, from Jesus’ example and teachings of love for enemies as well as for friends, this second Biblical model is grace, undeserved love and justice that extend to all beings, universally.  The sun shines on the just and on the unjust.  Universal favor.  Grace.

This morning I would like to introduce to you the stories of two historic Universalists:

John Murray (1741-1815) taught Radical Grace.  Murray grew up in England and Ireland in a strict Calvinist home.  He converted to Methodism as a teenager and fell in love with Eliza Neal.  Because they were Methodists, Eliza was disinherited as sole heir of her grandfather’s estate. They married penniless.  On hearing the heretical preacher James Relly preach that Jesus died to save all humanity, Murray struggled within his own mind and with his Methodist fellows, finally to be dismissed for his acceptance of universal salvation.

In addition to being excluded, the young lovers’ baby died at the age of one year.  Then  Eliza died soon after.  John was thrown into prison for debts accumulated during his wife’s illness.  On his release from prison, John managed to pay his debts.  James Relly encouraged Murray to preach, but Murray only wanted to get away from London to find solitude and never preach again.

In 1770, he sailed for America.  The story goes that Murray’s vessel ran aground upon a sandbar off Cranberry Inlet on the New Jersey Coast.  Forced to wait for high tide and a change of wind, Murray went ashore for food for the crew.  There he met a countryman named Thomas Potter who said, “No, I do not sell fish.  I have them for the taking up, and you may obtain them the same way.” So Murray received fish for the sailors and accepted Thomas Potter’s invitation to return for an evening on shore.

Potter had built a chapel on his property, open to traveling preachers.  That evening, he prevailed upon Murray to preach in the chapel on condition that the wind did not change overnight.  Confident, he sent messengers throughout the countryside to carry the news that a preacher had come to preach the next day.

After preaching at Thomas Potter’s chapel, Murray’s ship proceeded to New York where his reputation preceded him.  He had many preaching invitations and finally settled in Gloucester where a number of Universalists had gathered, influenced by a copy of James Relly’s book brought from London.  Other ministers stirred up sentiments against him until the Gloucester Committee of Safety ordered him to leave town; Murray refused.

With the outbreak of the American Revolution, Murray became a chaplain of the Rhode Island Brigade.  Despite a petition by other army chaplains for his removal, General George Washington sent General Orders appointing Murray Chaplain to the Rhode Island Regiment, saying “he is to be respected as such.” Living from 1741 to 1815, John Murray is considered the founder of American Universalism (Clinton Lee Scott, These Live Tomorrow, 1964).

Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) held Ultra-Universalism (“Death and Glory”).  Born the 11^th child of a poor farmer/preacher of a Calvinistic Baptist church, his mother died within two years of his birth.  In his late teens, Hosea was baptized, full immersion, outdoors in New Hampshire, in January (because that is when the revival took place).  They had to keep breaking the ice.

When John Murray was 50, and he was 20, Hosea Ballou heard Murray speak.  He also heard a traveling Universalist preacher, Caleb Rich, and found compelling the view that a loving God would save all God’s children.

After attending a Quaker school for a few weeks, Hosea became a teacher himself.  He became a Universalist preacher in Vermont where Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, deist, free-thinkers challenged traditional notions of the Trinity, pre-destination, miracles and prayer as a means of changing the mind of God.

While many Universalists were “Restorationists,” believing that God would eventually restore all to heaven after a period of punishment for sins, Hosea Ballou rejected the traditional doctrine that Christ died for our sins to appease God.  In his book Treatise on Atonement (1882), he proposed that it is not God who must be reconciled with human beings, but human beings who must be reconciled to God.  Ballou asked (with a 19^th century effort at inclusive language):  “Your child has fallen into the mire, and its body and its garments are defiled. You cleanse it, and array it in clean robes. The query is, ‘Do you love your child because you have washed it? Or, did you wash it because you loved it?’”

For Hosea Ballou, it is not Jesus’ death on the cross that reconciles God to all humanity.  Rather it is the nature of a loving God to embrace all God’s children with universal grace.  God’s universal love led Ballou to fight against slavery and against capital punishment (Kay Saucier).

Universalism has continued to change.  Mary Livermore and Clarence Skinner articulated Universalism as a social gospel. With the life and teachings of Jesus as one of many guides, it is love and justice incarnated in our lives here and now that will save the world, save the privileged as well as the poor and marginalized.  Faith in the power of love to extend justice and kindness to all beings, universally, is a fragile faith (Rebecca Parker, Blessing the World).  Evidence of violence and destitution breeding further violence and oppression seem to be everywhere.  It is a characteristic of the mind that we humans focus on threat and suffering.  It’s a survival mechanism of the brain.  The challenge for us is, despite threat and suffering, to be awake to grace that surrounds us in large and small ways every moment!

It is a fragile faith that is willing to keep faith with love and justice, the grace that is life’s gift.  We were made for relationships, for mutual kindness, for the synergy of love and justice.  We do not have to create it or build it.  It is a gift built into the human condition.  Imperial injustice and selfish cruelty grate like sand in our teeth.  They just don’t work.

The challenge I see is that we pay attention with awe, humility, and gratitude to the gifts of life.  That we join our lives with those who have gone before in celebrating universalist faith in the reality of interdependent relationships.   Emil Gudmundson offers thoughts appropriate for this Stewardship month:

“May we have faith in life to do wise planting
that the generations to come may reap
even more abundantly than we.
May we be bold in bringing to fruition
the golden dreams of human kinship and justice
that, today, the fields of promise
become fields of reality.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Standing on the Side of Love”
Rev. Rod Debs

Story Standing on the Side of Love: A Story for All Ages by Mandy Neff

Once there was a second grader named Paul. In September, he moved to a new town, had a new teacher and a new class and a brand-new desk. There was a boy sitting across from him with bright red hair, and his name was Ryan. He told Paul a knock-knock joke, and he was really funny—so that first day was a good day.

The second day, three other boys came up to Ryan and he thought, “Oh, great. They want to make friends with me too!” But that wasn’t what happened. They came up and started poking Paul, and even calling him names.

He looked at his friend Ryan. Ryan really didn’t want to hear what was going on, so what do you think he did? What would you do if you didn’t want to hear something that was going on? . . . Well, what he did was this. Stick your fingers in your ears.

That second day wasn’t such a good day. But the next day was even worse, because the three boys came up to Paul at lunchtime, and they stole his lunch. He didn’t have anything to eat!

The next day, Paul didn’t come to school at all. The three boys were cheering that day because Paul wasn’t there. Then, even though he didn’t want to, Ryan heard them planning mean things they were going to do when Paul came back to school. But this time he didn’t stick his fingers in his ears. What do you think he did? . . .

That’s right, he told the teacher. And when Paul came back to school and there was recess, the three boys came around. But then, the teacher came around too.

And Ryan said, ”C’mon, come play with me!” And that day was the best day of all, because that day, Paul and Ryan became best friends.

And so my hope for all of you is that, when you hear something you’d rather not hear, that you don’t stick your fingers in your ears. I hope that when you see or hear someone that needs your help, that this year, you find a way to stand up for someone who needs you.  That’s what it means to “Stand on the Side of Love.”

(The basis of this story is Becky Ray McCain’s Nobody Knew What To Do: A Story About Bullying, illustrated by Todd Leonardo, Albert Whitman & Company, 2001.)

Message On Valentine’s Day weekend, our entire society celebrates romantic love, that invisible heartstring that draws us to lovers and to intimate companions. Biologists, observe this romantic attraction to be rooted in RS, the evolutionary brain function rewarding “reproductive success” (RS).

Romantic love seems to be more than reproductive drive.  Social psychologists describe romantic love as shaped by dreams and expectations, fantasies of ecstatic fulfillment that we project on our beloved when we “fall in love.”  They point out that even strangers “fall in love” seeing one another as a dream come true.  Common wisdom is that “love is blind”—blind to reality, preferring our romantic projections.

Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country, today, are celebrating our public witness campaign, “Standing on the Side of Love.”  The love we speak about is different from romantic love.  Unitarian Charles Dickens was Standing on the Side of Love when he wrote his novels about the destitute underclass in England.

Early American Unitarians Franklin, Jefferson and Adams were Standing on the Side of Love when they advocated for “the right of conscience” in the founding of our nation, defending brutalized Baptists, Quakers and other religious minorities by establishing the separation of church and state in the United States.

Unitarian John Quincy Adams was Standing on the Side of Love when he defended the Amistad slaves.  Standing on the Side of Love Against Slavery were Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, and it cost Channing a forced early retirement.  The women’s suffrage movement led by Unitarians Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, by Universalists Mary Livermore and Olympia Brown, was Standing on the Side of Love for women’s right to vote in federal elections.

Unitarian Dorothea Dix was Standing on the Side of Love by founding 30 asylums for more humane treatment of those with mental illness.  Unitarian Clara Barton was Standing on the Side of Love in founding the American Red Cross aiding the injured in the Civil War.  Unitarian Horace Mann was Standing on the Side of Love in founding the first publicly-funded schools so that poor children might have education as well as children of wealthy families.

Today, Unitarian Universalist individuals and congregations are Standing on the Side of Love by working for marriage equality for Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender persons, and by working for humane immigration policies.  Members here have been Standing on the Side of Love in commitment to Sharing and Caring for the hungry, Shelter House for survivors of domestic violence, and Opportunity Place shelter for homeless women and families.  Love is something more concrete and expansive than romance.

The UUA does not give us weekly sermons to preach.  I did find some quotes for “Standing on the Side of Love” Sunday and a workshop based on my mentor, Carter Heyward’s insights on love (Our Passion for Justice,1984).

Professor Heyward helps us dig deeper into the meaning of love beyond romance, beyond reproductive success or projections of our dreams and expectations.  She describes love as mutual relationships.  Mutuality.  Carter Heyward wrote:

“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.

“Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

“For this reason loving involves commitment.… Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.”

I suspect that Humanists and liberal Christians might agree with Carter Heyward that, “Love is a conversion to humanity… the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world….”  Rather than seeking to convert humanity to one or another Truth among the countless perspectives competing in the Modern world, Post-Modernism is a conversion to humanity, celebrating all life with its plural perspectives.

The posture of Modernism has been Enlightenment’s worship of one or another Truth, intellectual models, competing symbolic representations of reality.  There is a deadly arrogance in the lingering Modernist perspective, each claiming the superior truth as aliens or deities above the ignorant and superstitious.  We know the story of the ten blind men and the elephant, each touching a different part of the giant creature, each declaring his description to be exclusively true in disdain of all others’.  None of us are called to have the whole truth, but we are called by love to empower shared wisdom.

Love, mutuality does not suggest capitulating to oppressive practices.  As Carter says: “Love is … a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies….  loving involves struggle, resistance, risk.” Martin Luther King, Jr. said:  “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” The touchstone for the use of power seems to be whether it implements the mutuality of love and justice rather than the endless cycle of conquest.  Yes, the mutuality of love and justice even and especially with one’s enemies.

Standing on the Side of Love is no romantic sentimentality.  It’s about how I relate to my acquaintances in creating mutual empowerment, how I looking into the eyes of the person who irritates me, a neighbor, child, stranger, politician.  For me, it’s about seeing through their words and actions, to their life and motivations, and choosing only those actions for myself that empower a more anti-oppressive, mutual world.

A Buddhist saying reads:  “If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your own path.” A Hindu proverb reads:  “Help your brother’s boat across, and your own will reach the shore.”

I don’t know what choices mutuality might ask of you in relation to your intimate companions, your community and strangers including those who do not share an anti-oppressive commitment with you.  The question before us remains, do we stand on the side of one or another Truth?  Or will we Stand on the Side of Love in human relations

Miguel de Unamuno reminds me:  “It’s not more light we need, but more warmth!  We die of cold, not of darkness.  It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“It Matters What You Believe”
Rev. Rod Debs
February 6, 2011

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Story: (adapted from Wisdom Tales from Around the World, Heather Forest, 1996)

Our story is from Congo, a country in Central Africa, where many of the people garden to grow their own food.  How many of your families do a little gardening to grow food?

Once upon a time there were two childhood friends who were determined to remain close companions always.  When these best friends were grown, they built houses facing one another.  There was just a small path (like this one) that formed a border between their gardens and houses.

One day a trickster from the village decided to test their friendship.  He dressed in a two-color shirt that was divided down the middle, black on one side and blue on the other side.  Wearing this shirt, the trickster walked along the narrow path between the two houses and gardens.

The two friends were each working across from one another in their gardens.  The trickster made enough noise as he traveled between them to cause each friend to look up from his side of the path at the same moment and notice him.

At the end of the day, one friend said to the other, “Wasn’t that a strange fellow with the black shirt?  Very strange!”  His friend replied, “Yes, he was strange.  But he clearly had a bright blue shirt.  Very strange fellow indeed!”

The first friend said, “I saw the man clearly as he walked between us.  What do you mean he had a blue shirt?  It was black!”  His friend replied, “You are wrong.  I saw him too, and his shirt was a bright blue.”

The first friend said, “I know what I saw!  The shirt was black!”  His friend replied, “You don’t know anything.  It was a very bright blue!”

“So,” shouted the first, “you think I am stupid?  I know what I saw.  It was black.”  “Blue,” shouted the other.  “Black!”  “Blue!”  “Black!”  “Blue!”

Just then the trickster returned, walking between them.  The two friends stopped and stared.  Now they saw only the other side of the trickster’s shirt.

The first friend quickly spoke up.  “I am so sorry, my dear friend.  I don’t know how I could have been so mistaken.  His shirt is certainly blue.”  And his friend said, “Oh, no, I apologize.  You were right.  The strange fellow’s shirt was clearly black as you said!”

Then they both stopped and frowned at each other.  The first said, “Are you making fun of me, now that I have acknowledged that I was mistaken?  I said I am sorry.  You were right.”  His friend stood there with his mouth open. “What, he said.  It is you that is mocking me.  I apologized for arguing with you about the shirt being blue.  Since you were right, you think you can make fun of me now for admitting I was wrong!”

They began to hit each other and roll on the ground fighting.

Just then the trickster returned and faced the two men who were punching and kicking each other and shouting, “Our friendship is over!”  The trickster walked right in front of them, displaying his two-color shirt.  He laughed and danced at their silly fight.

The two friends saw that his shirt was divided right down the middle, both black and bright blue.  They stopped fighting and stood silently.  They turned to each other and both said, “I’m sorry.”

They had both been right, and they had both been wrong.

From that day, when either one said something the other disagreed with, they would listen to one another.  Different views could indeed both be true, and partly wrong at the same time.  Each person has a different perspective, a different point of view.

The good friends never argued or fought ever again.  They just listened with an open heart.  Their friendship became unbreakable.

Message: Most Sunday mornings when I speak, I welcome newcomers with an introduction that this Unitarian Universalist congregation is a religious community gathered, not around any particular beliefs, but gathered with a promise that we behave in such a way that each person coming in our doors will feel safe in their personal integrity.  Rather than requiring belief, it is behavior that we covenant, behavior of mutual trust and support at the core of our gathered community.

I sometimes speak of Thomas Jefferson as a unitarian, committed to the “right of conscience” who went so far as to declare:  “Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.”

At the origin of our Unitarian religion in the sixteenth century, Francis David (1510-1579), bishop to the Court of King John Sigismond declared, “We need not think alike to love alike.” It is not believing alike, but our behavior of mutual relations, our love that unites us in religious community.  Francis David was martyred by the Jesuits for his religious “innovations,” but under the reign of Transylvania’s Unitarian King John Sigismund, for the first time in history, an Edict of Religious Toleration was made the law of the nation. (In our vestibule I hope you will take a few moments to view the print and description of the painting commemorating the Edict of Religious Toleration by the Diet of Torda, prominently displayed in the city center of Kolosvar, Romania.)

When asked what Unitarian Universalists believe by those who think beliefs are most important, we sometimes misstate that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything we want.  As if beliefs are rather trivial.  As if it doesn’t matter what we believe.  Let me suggest:  Each of us needs to be free to believe what our conscience demands of us, but it is not true that one belief is the same as another.

Sophia Lyons Fahs (1876-1978) who contributed to the renaissance of Unitarianism in the 1930’s to 1950’s through her New Beacon Series in Religious Education, wrote “It Matters What We Believe”:  “Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.  Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern. Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.  Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.” It matters very much what we believe.

I would like to invite you to join me, if you will, in a thought experiment.  The opposing generalizations I am going to make might reasonably be thought to be true.  Observe whether entertaining each view creates a different feeling and likely different behavior. Let’s begin with these:

“Dogs bite.”  Observe the image you have in your mind.  “Dogs are playful.”  Notice the image you have now.  When I think, “Dogs bite,” I am fearful and not likely to reach out to dogs, regardless of my actual experience.  When I hold the idea that dogs are playful, I look for signs of playfulness and grab at the chance to play with them.

Consider:  “Children are delightful.”  “Children are uncontrollable.”  When I entertain each of these thoughts, I feel differently toward the children I meet, regardless of how they act.  I think I behave differently depending on the beliefs I hold.

“People are untrustworthy.”  “People are endlessly interesting.”  When I entertain these ideas, the one generates fear and defensive behavior in me.  The other generates curiosity and a tendency to open-hearted engagement.

“Black men are dangerous.”  “Black men are brilliant.”  When I entertain each of these beliefs, my mind conjures up images that create fear in the first case, and delight in the second.  Should I adopt one or the other of these beliefs, I think I would probably behave differently when confronted by real men of color.

Animals and children, women and men, immigrants and people of color, no-one deserves the negative projections we pile on them.  They do not deserve the negative behavior that we bring along with our prejudices, our negative beliefs.  Our beliefs do matter.  Our beliefs can do harm, and they can heal.

Internationally-known spiritual advisor Byron Katie offers four questions to ask of our beliefs:  1) Is it true?  2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?  3) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?  4)  Who would you be without the thought?  She writes:  “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always” (http://www.thework.com/thework.php).

If we were to ask of our beliefs:  Is it true?  Is it absolutely true?  We might discover that the truth of our beliefs is not absolute.  Not in all cases.  How could we possibly know the absolute truth anyway?

Perhaps we would do well to consider what happens when we believe various different beliefs!  Perhaps we might choose to hold in our minds more generous, gracious thoughts because our beliefs change us and our projections influence others as well.  When others think good things about me, whether more critical judgments might be to some degree well-grounded or not, their gracious judgment and behavior draws out better behavior in me!  I live up to their generous judgments.

The hard part is to resist living down to others’ negative, discouraging projections.

What we believe about the universe matters too.  If your metaphor of reality is that of a violent, judgmental father-God, a reality that demands obedience and crucifixion of God’s own child to appease his anger for human offenses, then your personal family relations, your national and international relations will likely reflect violent punishment.

Rebecca Parker writes that the first thousand years of Christianity never saw images of the tortured son of God twisting on the cross (Blessing the World, 2006, p.117; Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, 2008).  Despite the violence of Imperial Rome, the first thousand years of Christian iconography displayed creation as Paradise.  The liberal Christian metaphor for reality has been of a gentle, nurturing parent, a mother-father God who nurtures humanity to co-create Paradise on earth.  Such a metaphor matters for family relations, for national and international relations as well.

If you embrace a metaphor of the universe as indifferent and meaningless, your response to your global life companions may be narcissism and indifference.  If you embrace an evolutionary metaphor of interconnected reality changing over time into ever more complicated forms, then the emergence of elements, bacteria, fungi, fern, dinosaur and human display purpose and meaning, each playing our own unique role in expanding life’s story.  Your belief expanding interconnectedness will matter for family relations, for national relations and for international relations too.

It matters what we believe.  If you believe the universe is indifferent or, that it is violent and vindictive, you may find it difficult to embrace the Unitarian Universalist covenant of “mutual trust and support,” as our Unitarian Universalist Principles declare, “grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith.”

At the same time, our religious pluralism, insofar as we gather in mutual trust and support, enriches and broadens our private perspectives and our limiting metaphors.

Parker Palmer writes:  “The great gift we receive on the inner journey is the certain knowledge that ours is not the only act in town.”  An anonymous source offers this view of truth: “A conclusion is the part where you got tired of thinking.”

In his Autobiography, Unitarian Benjamin Franklin wrote: “I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration to change opinions, . . . that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay attention to the judgment of others.”

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote:  “We must love them both – those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject.  For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.”

In closing … and as an opening of our small group discussions to follow, Kahlil Gibran writes these beautiful words:

“You are my brothers and sisters…, here as my companions along the path of light, and my aid in understanding the meaning of hidden Truth.

“I love you for your Truth, derived from your knowledge.  I respect it as a divine thing, for it is the deed of the spirit.

“Your Truth shall meet my Truth and blend together like the fragrance of flowers and become one whole and eternal Truth, perpetuating and living in the eternity of Love and Beauty.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“A Privileged Place”
Rev. Rod Debs
January 23, 2011

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Story: (1) “Tico and the Golden Wings” by Leo Lionni

(2)  Once upon a time, there was a little bird by the name of Tico.  Tico would sit on your shoulder and tell you all about the flowers and trees.  He said that when he was young, his wings were so small that no one could even see them.  He had to hop around the forest when all the grown-up birds could fly.

(3)  Luckily, the other birds were kind and loving.  The bigger birds would fly all around the forest and bring him fruit and berries from even the tallest trees.  As a young bird, Tico often wondered why he couldn’t fly like the other birds.  Tico wanted to soar through the big blue sky over villages and treetops.

(4)  At night, Tico dreamed that a magic bird would visit him and give him the strongest, most beautiful wings ever, golden wings.  In the daytime, Tico would hop and stretch his tiny wings, practicing for the day he would have his dream: golden wings!

(5)  Tico worked so hard exercising his wings, that his dream did come true.  Tico’s wings grew stronger and brighter until they glowed golden like the sun.  He could fly higher than the mountains.  Tico could look down upon towns and rivers.  He could soar high above all the birds that used to bring him fruit and berries.  He was very happy.

(6)  But when his friends saw him swoop down from the sky, they frowned and said, “You think you are better than we are, don’t you, with those golden wings.  You wanted to be different.”  And off they flew without talking to him any more.

(7)  Why had they gone?  Why were they angry?  What was so bad about being different?  Tico thought:  “I can fly higher than an eagle.  My wings are the most beautiful wings in the world.  Why did my friends leave me?”  Tico was very lonely.

(8)  One day Tico saw a man sitting in front of his hut.  He was a basketmaker.  He had tears in his eyes.  Tico flew to a branch and asked, “Why are you sad?”  The basketmaker said, “Oh, little bird, my child is sick, and I am poor.  I cannot buy the medicines that would make him well.”  Tico thought, “How can I help him?”  Then he knew!  “I will give the basketmaker one of my feathers.”

(9)  The poor man was so happy!  “You have saved my child,” he said.  “Look!  Your wing!”  Where the golden feather had been, there was a real black feather, as soft as silk.

(10)  From that day, one by one, Tico gave his golden feathers away, and black feathers appeared in their place.  He bought many presents:  three new puppets for a poor puppeteer…

(11)  … a spinning wheel to spin the yarn for an old woman’s shawl…

… a compass for a fisherman who got lost at sea…

(12)  When Tico had given his last golden feathers to a beautiful bride, his wings were as black as India ink, soft and strong.

(13)  Tico flew to the big tree where his friends gathered for the night.  Tico wondered, “Would they welcome him?”

(14)  They all chirped in joy, not because Tico had black wings like theirs, but because Tico had done what he could to help others, just as they had helped Tico a long time ago.  Every one of them helped make the world a better place!

Message: This morning we sang an Irish tune with lyrics by Tom Mikelson, a fellow Iowan who is pastor of the Unitarian Universalist congregation across the street from Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA.  Tom wrote:

“Wake, now, my senses, and hear the earth call; feel the deep power of being in all; keep, with the web of creation your vow, giving, receiving as love shows us how.”

Tom’s thought is that the earth calls us and that we have a vow to keep with the web of creation, a sacred relationship of giving and receiving as love shows us how.  Feel the deep power of being in all, and take not for granted a privileged place, giving, receiving as love shows us how.

Some years ago a study found that we Unitarian Universalists have the highest average member income of the forty or so religious faiths in the United States.  Tom Mikelson’s little Irish tune challenges us to “wake, now, my senses” and “take not for granted” our privileged place.  What is our privileged place?  How shall we make use of it rather than to simply take it for granted?

I would like to show you some slides from the November 27, 2010, Business Insider: “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality in America” by Gus Lubin: http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-about-inequality-in-america-2011-11#and-income-tax-just-keeps-getting-lower-and-lower-for-the-rich-10 .   I dare say that any topic I take up, there is someone in the congregation who could speak in greater depth on the subject than I.  Yet, I have chosen 10 of 15 graphs for your reflection.  How shall we make use of our privileged place rather than simply take it for granted?

(1)  The poorest half of America owns 2.5% of the country’s wealth.  The richest 1% owns a third of the country’s wealth and the next richest 9% own another third.  10% of us own 71% of United States wealth.

(2)  The bottom, poorest 50% of America owns only 0.5% of United States stocks, bonds and mutual funds.  The top 1% owns more than 50%!  The top 10% own 90%.

(3)  The wealth gap has grown in the past 20 years.  This slide shows the changing share of capital income earned by the top 1% as compared to the bottom 80%.

(4)  The last twenty years were great if you were a CEO or business owner or banker or trader.  Not if you were anyone else.  Corporate profits up (in green).  CEOs’ pay up 298.2% (in blue).

(5)  Despite the carrot of social mobility, poor Americans have a very slim chance of rising to the upper middle class.  The solid line is upward mobility; the broken line is downward mobility percentages.  The Inheritance Tax was designed by the Founding Fathers in order to prevent the United States from having a permanent aristocracy, as in Europe, and to empower social mobility.

(6)  Tax cuts have significantly increased the wealth gap.  In 1962, the wealthiest 1% of households averaged 125 times the wealth of the median household.   Business Insider shows the wealth gap growing, the wealthiest 1% averaging  190 times the wealth of the median household.

(7)  Income tax just keeps getting lower and lower for the for the highest-income households in the last fifty years.

(8)  The income gap is NOT growing in other countries, like France.   This graph compares the relative changes of the top 1% of income in France and in the United States.

(9)  This shows the relative income gap among the states. Inequality is worst around Wall Street and Oil Land.

(10)  With 1979 as a base line, the top 1% have seen their share of America’s income more than double.  The bottom 90% have seen their portion shrink.  Gus Lubin writes, “If you aren’t in the top 1% of America’s earners, you’re pretty much screwed.”

(11)  So I return to the original point of this article in Business Insider:  The poorest half of America owns 2.5% of the country’s wealth, while the richest 1% owns a third and the next richest 9% own another third.  Together, the richest 10% of us own 71% of United States’ wealth.

I suspect that you and I are not among the top 1% or even the top 10% of income within the United States.  But on the global scene, we are certainly among the most privileged.

Jeannette and I have hosted sixteen foreign exchange students for their school year in the U.S.  You may remember Dragana, Ivana, Ella, Timur, and most recently, Feriel. For all our efforts to host working-class children, several came from privilege in their own countries.  Maids cleaned their family homes every day and cooked and laundered.  Ella had a chauffeur drive her to boarding school each week.

Privileged children lacked basic skills to clean up after themselves and had an aversion to getting their hands dirty.  Girls as well as boys could not cook or clean the dishes.  They knew nothing of sharing household chores, something we negotiate daily.  They did not think of themselves as privileged.  They took it for granted.

Compared to my parents’ generation, I have been submerged in privilege slowly increasing throughout my lifetime.  I prepare meals a good bit but eat out several times a week.  I grow virtually no food.  I raise rabbits, but I don’t eat them.  Like most Americans, I have become dependent on low-paid grocery, restaurant, and agricultural food service industries.  I am dependent on car mechanics, computer technicians, appliance and air-conditioning service providers.

Take not for granted a privileged place.  What shall we do with our privilege?

Charity, compassion is an evolutionary brain function in 98% of humans, neutralized by stress’s oxytocin.  Who among us can bear to see the hungry face to face?  The homeless without a place to sleep cold nights?  The sick or injured without medical assistance?  Charity is an expression of our humanity.  Yet charity is not justice.

After the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., many work for economic justice.  I think of social/economic justice in two parts:  Distributive Justice and Contributive Justice.

Distributive Justice is when workers get a living wage and fairly share in the fruits of their labors.  In an unregulated economy, distribution is seldom just.  Unjust distribution creates spirals of poverty and dependency among the poor, and among the rich it creates extravagance and dependency.

Contributive Justice is the recognition that human health and wholeness requires that poor and rich alike contribute in some meaningful way to the general good.  The poor are not treated justly if they do not have meaningful work to contribute to society.  That’s why so many advocate for a safety net of food, housing, medical care and universal education of a higher quality than mere competition for the highest paid occupations.  Each person needs to be educated to perform useful and meaningful work in society.  A healthy society requires it.

We wealthy are not treated justly if we do not make meaningful contributions to society either.  It’s a matter of relational health and wholeness.  Without contributing to society, humans feel alienated, disconnected.  Recent retirees know how it feels not to be needed for your contribution.  When I came home from college between terms, my father recognized the state of meaninglessness when he said, “You look lost.”

Children who learn to share making useful contributions to their family and then to their community are the kids who thrive.  Their lives have meaning and worth which they themselves recognize.  They are not merely slaves to the dopamine surges of entertainment nor of the latest commercial products nor of sports competitions beating the other side nor of trouble-making.

Social Justice for the privileged as well as for the poor involves each person finding a place of meaningful, useful contribution without which, we die inside.

Three Christian Gospels recount a story of Jesus in dialogue with a very upstanding, rich, young man.  He has followed all of the Jewish law.  Jesus says that there is one thing lacking: he should sell all he has and give to the poor (Mark 10:17-31; Matthew 19:16-30; Luke 18:19-30).  We could focus on whether the Gospel writer believed a conquering Messiah was soon to come, rendering all possessions of no long term value.  Or whether the Gospel writer was really speaking of “all” properties the rich man owned, or of all those short of rendering himself poor as well.

But I would focus on the charge that the rich man “give to the poor.”  What do we have to give to one another?  Certainly there are material essentials of food, clothing, shelter and medical care that we can give.  But there are further gifts of greater value that others need from us.  Poor and rich alike need to find places of meaningful contribution to society.

Privilege gives us, the rich, an opportunity to “give to the poor” mutual empowerment of one another’s contributions to society.  “Take not for granted a privileged place.” Our privilege is a calling to serve, to find meaning and wholeness in empowering others to contribute.  It’s our gift.

“Wake, now, my senses, and hear the earth call; feel the deep power of being in all; keep, with the web of creation your vow, giving, receiving as love shows us how.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Being Faith”
Rev. Rod Debs
January 16, 2011

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Story for All Ages: “Does Your God Bite?”

Can you trust animals?… like giraffes and rhinos, manatees and rabbits?  How about your dog or cat?  Does your cat bite or scratch?  Why do you think he does that?  I remember a kitten that was teased by people in the house, poked and roughed up.  She grew up to bite anyone who touched her.  I think that treating animals badly sometimes turns them into biters.

Most rabbits don’t bite.  But I once had a rabbit that would bite.  His name was Keyson.  Every day when I fed Keyson, I would hold his head with one hand so he couldn’t bite me, and rub his forehead with the other.  He liked that.  After several months of being kind to him, whenever I opened his cage, Keyson would come and put his chin on the cage-sill so that I could rub his forehead.  I think it was because I was kind to him that Keyson trusted me and no longer tried to bite me.

People don’t usually bite each other like some animals do, but sometimes people are mean.  Have you ever met someone who would hit other kids?  Or push other kids down?  I don’t hit or push, but I have “barked” at people sometimes.  I don’t think being unkind helps make things better.  If I had hit my rabbit Keyson, or pushed or shouted at him, I really don’t think he would have stopped biting.

Sometimes it takes a long time for people to learn to have faith in kindness rather than faith in hitting and fighting or shouting and being mean to people who are mean to you.  You might believe that kindness is better than fighting, but to really have faith that kindness works best in the long run, takes a long time to really feel.  Faith is a gift of life experience that not everyone receives.

This is a trophy Keyson won at a rabbit show in Copperas Cove, Texas.  If he had bitten the judges like he used to bite me, he would have been disqualified.  He never would have won this trophy.  Keyson learned to trust people because of my kindness—even when he was a biter.

The lesson I hope you will remember is this:  Practice being kind like I was to Keyson —carefully, especially around biters.  People and animals will learn to trust you.  It might take a long time, but kindness might turn them into trophy friends.

Opening: “Faith is not belief.  Belief is passive. Faith is active.” –Edith Hamilton

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” –Martin Luther King. Jr

Message: The 44^th chapter of Ecclesiastes begins, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” The passage goes on to celebrate the countless forgotten common women and men who strove without achieving fame, whose lives laid the foundation for the accomplishments by those famous in our day.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was taken as the title of a Depression-era book published in 1941 by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans documenting stories of white Alabama share-croppers and the stark images of gaunt families huddled in bare shacks in the 1930’s depression.  The irony of the title is that countless forgotten people have survived desperate conditions, perhaps more faithful in their striving than the privileged, famous few.

The lyrics of the African-American national anthem read in part:

“Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;

we have come, treading our path thru the blood of the slaughtered,….

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us;

sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

facing the rising sun of our new day begun, let us march on till victory is won.”

What is the “faith that the dark past has taught us”?

There are many different faiths life might teach.  Victor Hugo says, “A library is an act of faith.” Faith in human drive to read of things beyond our personal experience.  Build a library, fill it with books, and your faith in the human drive to read will be rewarded.

I have a neighbor who repairs boats for a living.  He and his wife gutted the cottage across the street, laid hard-wood floors, hung doors, replaced walls and ceilings, built in a new kitchen, painted inside and out, laid a brick driveway—Mike seems to be able to do anything.  Last night they were using heavy equipment and flood lights to trim the live oak trees shading their lawn.  It was Mike we hired to pull an old tub and install tile and glass block shower.  You should see their five-year-old son.  He’s a little dare-devil riding his skate-board or bicycle without a seat.  He thinks he can do anything.  I call his a courageous faith in his own physical abilities.  It’s a gift he has received from watching his parents and their super-handy friends making and building.

There are some whose faith is driven by fear.  The Hebrew prophets warned the people of Israel not to fear swords and chariots nor trust in them, but to do justice to the poor, the widow and orphan, and the stranger within your gates.  The prophets knew that a healthy community can tap wells of wisdom and courage greater than the threat of overpowering military might.  But Hebrew Scriptures tell of kings fearfully subjecting themselves to foreign powers and suffering brutal oppression, or making alliances and fighting only to be brutally defeated and oppressed into slavery.  The message of the Hebrew prophets is that only faith in community justice and right relationships can enable a people to survive surrounded by overwhelming military might.

Lech Walesa said, “Deep faith eliminates fear.” How can this be?

Sometimes we confuse faith with mere beliefs.  Beliefs are mere intellectual convincement.  We are surrounded by arguments for various world views or practices that are purported to solve our problems.  We don’t know.  Maybe some of these practices and products actually work.  We may be intellectually and emotionally convinced, really believe with our hearts and minds, but our beliefs are more “pipe-dream” wishful thinking than a matter of faith and action based on lived experience.

Let me unpack a verse of Christian Scripture which you might find familiar.  Ephesians 2:8:  “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: It is the gift of God; Not of works, lest any man should boast.” Grace is understood by Christians as “undeserved favor” bestowed on humanity by—call it God or Reality or the unnamable mystery.  Whatever the unfathomable source, humanity is graced with undeserved favor according to this text.

This saving grace is “through faith, and that not of yourselves:  It is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” For centuries, Christians have understood faith to be a gift of God.  In our own history, Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania presiding at the Diet of Torda declared as much.  Let me read from King Sigismund’s  Act of Religious Toleration and Freedom of Conscience in 1568:  “… in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.  Therefore none of the superintendents of others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone,… and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching, for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.” (David Parke, The Epic of Unitarianism, 1985, p.19)

Faith is a gift from the unfathomable, God or Reality, if you wish.  There are, however, different gifts of faith, as different as there are cultures and human experience.

If life has shown you the power of violence to destroy and by destruction to coerce and control others, the faith you receive as a gift may indeed be a faith in violence.  If your dad and his friends can build and fix anything with the aid of power tools and huge machinery, the gift of faith you may grow into is a faith in yourself, like your dad.  If, like Lech Walesa, you have seen solidarity among workers, the gift of faith you have received may be that “the people united shall never be defeated” even by weapons and violence.  If in your society money determines inclusion or exclusion and access to necessities of life, then you may grow into a faith in money.  If you have experienced love and compassion, giving and receiving, then you may grow into a faith in loving-kindness and compassion.  Faith is a gift of life we grow into that we dare to live.

Sherwood Eddy writes:  “Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence; faith is daring something regardless of the consequences.”

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.”

Our American Unitarian forebears rejected the so-called “enthusiasm” of the Great Revivals, emotional preaching that today along with music grasps hearts and minds to believe, to repent and to convert to a religious ideology.  Throughout history there have been prophets, but also demagogues who could convince masses to believe—to believe their ideology:  David Koresh, Jim Jones, Adolph Hitler on the one hand, and on the other, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

We humans can be mobilized by political and religious rhetoric to wage war on so-called “evil empires,” Nazis or Commies, to lock and load on socialists and godless liberals.  Hate radio and TV opinion-reporting guided by ideological think tanks and highly-paid public relations firms have great power to raise religious and political “enthusiasm.”  Our beliefs can be manipulated.  That’s why we seek academic education with its checks and balances of global reality-based academic fields.

Reality is the trustworthy source for all our imperfect grasp of it.  The gift of faith is rooted in more than enthusiastic beliefs.  Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote:  “Faith is much better than belief.  Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”

Personally, the faith that drives my ministry is a kind of intuition, a skepticism, doubts deeply rooted in my soul.  Call it the still small voice of integrity even when reason and rhetoric, authority and culture gang up to say I’m wrong.  When all the arguments in my own head line up against my inner intuition, I cling to my integrity, the gift of faith that the reality of life has buried deep within me.  Emily Dickinson wrote of this reality-based intuition that nibbles at the soul, challenging the conclusions of beliefs.  She writes:

Because of this belligerent integrity I feel within myself, I need a safe place to nurture my reality-based faith.  Unitarian Universalist gatherings I promote and support is the pluralistic, covenant community, promising to one another to be a safe place for your religious integrity as well as my own.

The gift of faith which each of us receives from the unfathomable reality of our life experience, from God (if you prefer), does actually differ from one person to another.  It requires humility to celebrate one another’s different view, as if we are each gazing at a different facet of the same diamond, reality.  To me, humility is the only posture appropriate before the awesome wonder and power and mystery of reality.  The arrogance of demagogues’ beliefs is so contrary to the humility of faith.

Emmanuel Teney said:  “As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.”

This weekend we celebrate the faith of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  His faith in the power of love, the message of Jesus and for that matter, the compassionate core of all the major world religions (see Karen Armstrong, Charter for Compassion).  Here are Dr. King’s words describing his faith:

“Every (person) must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

What is the faith that nibbles at your soul?  May you and I be faithful.  May this be a place that affirms and supports one another’s faith.

Rabindranath Tagore writes:  “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”

Closing: “For those who may not find happiness to exercise religious faith, it’s okay to remain a radical atheist, it’s absolutely an individual right, but the important thing is, with a compassionate heart—then no problem.”  –The Dalai Lama

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Being Hope”
Rev. Rod Debs
January 9, 2011

This morning I am speaking of hope, “Being Hope.”  The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah claimed that “words are cheap”:  “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, `Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11, RSV).  To say the words, to declare out loud and even to believe in peace and joy and hope, has little to do with reality when in our real lives there is no peace, no joy, no hope.  Beliefs, mere words of intellectual assent, lack the reality of lived behavior.

Following last month’s messages on “Being Peace” and “Being Joy,” I have assigned myself to explore what “Being Hope” this Sunday, and, next Sunday, “Being Faith” might look like in real, lived behavior.  Words are cheap.  We need the realities of peace and joy and hope in our lives.  Rather than a religion of mere intellectual beliefs, ours is the challenge to implement behaviors that make for peace and joy and hope.

In one of our Fellowship’s small groups, the Book ‘n Fruit Friendship Circle, we are reading and discussing a book by Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry, entitled Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now (2006).  Reflecting on the ashes of 9-11, the Reverend Dr. Parker suggests that the apocalypse has already happened.  We are living in the aftermath of devastation.  The world is filled with remnants surviving fallen towers, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, famine, disease and war.

Rebecca Parker writes:  “We are living in a postslavery, post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam, post-Hiroshima world.  We are living in the aftermath of collective violence that has been severe, massive, and traumatic.  The scars from slavery, genocide, and meaningless war mark our bodies.  We are living in the midst of rain forest burning, the rapid death of species, the growing pollution of the air and water, and new mutations of racism and violence….

“How do we live in this world?  What is our religious task?  The traditional response of religious liberalism is to place our hope in the future… that… a new age will dawn…. I have done my share of calling for the end of evil empires and announcing that the promised land is just around the corner, but I have come to believe that we need to let go of this religious myth.  We need to face more honestly the conditions of devastation that we are in the midst of, here and now.  As we enter the new millennium, we need to see ourselves as people living in the aftermath of cataclysmic violence rather than as people awaiting the overthrow of the present world order and the birth of the new.  We must… see the world as it is, focusing our attention on the marks of past violence in our personal and collective experience.  We must notice the breakdown, sorrow, and legacies of injustice that characterize our current world order.  From this place of honesty, we must discover how we can live among the ruins” (Rebecca Parker, Blessing the World, pp.20-21).

Today, we are grieving yesterday’s killing of six in Tuscon, including a nine-year old child and a federal judge, Representative Gabrielle Giffords shot in the head and nine others wounded.  Murder, common in many nations that suffer great destitution as well as armed violence.  “How do we live in such a world?  What is our religious task?” (Ibid., p.21)  Where do we find living hope in the aftermath of apocalyptic violence.

Some have loved ones with cancer.  Where do you find hope?  Nancy Mitchell on the local League of Women Voters Board died suddenly from an aneurysm a week ago Tuesday.   How can her mother continue on the League of Women Voters Board where her daughter served by her side?  Where do others find hope in the aftermath of personal devastation?

I do not believe you or I can tell another person where they will find hope.  Rebecca Parker writes:  “In my dreams over the past twenty years, the recurring images of the world are postwar images: a city in smoking ruins at twilight, fire-bombed to ashes, and scavengers sifting through the ruins.  The task is to walk among the ruins, find what can be saved, and gather up materials to rebuild… a kind of salvage work, recognizing the resources that sustain and restore life….

“In the mix of beauty and injustice that marks any religious tradition, we must judge what gives life and what oppresses…. We need the Sabbath candles, the house of study, the bread of communion, the silence of sitting, the teachings of Jesus, the dance of Sufis, the body-rhythm of gospel singing, the word of prayer, the narratives of the soul’s dark night, the cross, and the ox-herding pictures” (Ibid., p.22).

In the face of such personal devastation experienced globally as well as among our friends, can we open our hearts to salvage, from among the full range of religious practices, those that restore and sustain life?  Candles and Scriptures, communion ritual and silent meditation, teachings of Jesus and Sufi dance, gospel singing and the prayers of various faiths, sacred stories of the dark night of the soul, pictures of ox-herding, and yes, even the cross?

Perhaps I have been too quick to repudiate “the cross” of submission and self-sacrifice, and failed to recognize the sustaining power of “the cross” of divine solidarity with the oppressed!  I am not suggesting that there are no oppressive and unjust religious traditions.  But there may be perspectives upon those religious traditions that restore and sustain.  I may have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”

Let me assure you.  I cannot say to the mother who has lost her daughter, that her prayers and songs and cross of Christ are worthless.  Nor could you, I suspect.  Our hearts are too tender.  Our minds are open to reframing the meanings of metaphors.  We are able to suspend our personal bull—“bologna meter”—to consider other angles of interpretation that could be salvaged, sifting through the ashes of religions that have fallen in smoke before our eyes.

A Catholic priest in Waterloo, Iowa, a member of our interfaith association once said to me that for people whose life involves cruel suffering, the cross is an important symbol of divine suffering, as they suffer.  A colleague recently advised me, as I plan a Sabbatical to visit Unitarian congregations in Transylvania, that these Romanian Unitarians have suffered for decades under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.  Subsequently, they have a different and less universalist Unitarianism than we.  The challenge for me will be to abstain from laying my parochial religious understandings on another people.

The challenge will be to sift through the ashes of Transylvanian Unitarianism and to celebrate those elements of Unitarian faith that restore and sustain their lives.  I might actually learn something that I could bring back to us who experience a different kind of brokenness, consumer privilege and wage-slavery.  I think it is no weakness of critical thinking to try to transcend my subjective perspective and to see what gives meaning, restores and sustains the lives of others.  What restores their sense of hope.

You may have noticed:  I have not offered a source of hope.  Rebecca Parker does suggest where you and I might go to find it.  To begin, we must face the truth of our experiences of suffering and oppression: truth-telling first.  Second, we must open ourselves to salvage whatever is life-restoring from the ashes of any source.  Third, Rebecca Parker writes:  “We must turn to those who have survived grief, victimization, denial, and paralysis…. The guides we should heed are those whom William James called `twice born,’ people who have grappled with suffering, loss, and oppression and found a way to survive…” (Ibid., p.23).

The African American women, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are examples of writers speaking from a context of grief and injustice, offering narratives of survival and restoration, about attaining peace.  We can learn hope from those who have known hopelessness and have come through to the other side.

Whenever I feel that my circumstances are hopeless, I remember the stories of Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, his practices of breathing meditation and faith in compassion.  My life has never been a war zone as was his.  He is one of my teachers who shows me a pathway to hope.

As you face the truth of beauty and apocalypse, and as you sift through the ashes for wisdom, who are your guides bearing the scars of suffering and survival?  There are many around us.  May we be open to learning from those who know the terrible truths and recognize their restoring and sustaining practices, as Rebecca Parker writes, “reconstructing from the ruins, a world of hospitality and peace” (Ibid., p.24).

Poet Adrienne Rich writes:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
A passion to make, and make again
where such un-making reigns.”

(Excerpt from Natural Resources in *Dreams of a Common Language*)

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled”
Rev. Rod Debs
December 26, 2010

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Story for All Ages: (“Jesus: Learning to Love” by Rod Debs)

What is Christmas all about?  Presents? Santa? (giving gifts to those we love)

The birth of Jesus?  I would like to tell you a little about Jesus.

From the time Jesus was born, all his life, his people were poor and Roman soldiers occupied his country. Roman soldiers did whatever they wanted to the people.  This was long before anyone had cars and trucks, and Roman soldiers would make people carry heavy loads for them.  The soldiers would beat people.  It was common to see dead people the Romans had killed.  They would break into your house anytime they wanted.  With the Roman soldiers taking so much there was never enough food.  This is what it was like for Jesus’ whole life.

There were some people who went along with the soldiers and did whatever bad things the soldiers told them.  People hated these Roman collaborators even though they were only doing what they were told!  The world felt shameful and lonely to people who went along with the Romans, everyone out for themselves.

Other people fought against the Romans and became a lot like their enemies, killing and hating.  Jesus didn’t think that worked very well either because fighting made lots of enemies, and even their so-called friends were mean and unkind.  The world felt cruel with everyone fighting.

Something else you should know:  Jesus grew up hearing his own people whisper about him, calling him bad names.  They said that his mother was a dirty woman even though Joseph had married her and adopted him.  Kids, adults, everyone treated him like they treated criminals, like they treated diseased or insane people, as if he didn’t belong here.  He was treated like strangers, foreigners, like he was dirty.

Jesus knew how outcasts felt, like the hated tax collector and people with diseases.  He knew how criminals and strangers and the poorest of the poor people around him felt.  Outcast.

Jesus also discovered how wonderful it felt when someone treated him with kindness.  He tried being kind to other kids, especially to other outcasts like him.  It felt great!  It felt like heaven!  As Jesus grew up, poor and suffering people enjoyed being around him because of his loving-kindness toward everyone, even toward outcasts.  They started to follow Jesus and tried loving-kindness too.

Most people thought of God as a conquering warrior-king, but Jesus thought the greatest power in the universe was loving-kindness, like an all-powerful father who loved the poor, all the sick, criminals and outcasts as his own children.  Even though it was extremely unusual in his day, Jesus spoke of God as “Daddy” (Abba).

The saving message Jesus taught was compassion, loving-kindness toward all.  He taught his followers to sell whatever they didn’t need, and give it to the poor—not to store up wealth that could be stolen or lost.  Perhaps the most amazing thing Jesus taught was to love your enemies.  Sometimes they would actually become friends!

Message:  Howard Thurman wrote:  “When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins:  to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace to others, to make music in the heart.”

This year I haven’t sung as many Christmas carols as in past years.  I remember caroling at the homes of Iowa shut-ins, bundled up with hats and gloves, cold feet, piling out of cars, singing in the snow.   Thurman must have been thinking about the Christmas carols when he wrote “when the song of angels, the stars, three kings, and shepherds is stilled.”  Growing up in an Evangelical Christian church, we sang the carols and read the Christmas stories every year.  At home we would put on records and sing Up on the Rooftop, Rudolph and Frosty and Silver Bells.  It was great fun, the Christmas tree, presents, Santa, driving to grandma’s house, making Christmas cookies, Christmas cards.  Cultural Christianity.

Howard Thurman challenged Christians to go beyond cultural festivities to do the “work of Christmas…: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace to others, to make music in the heart.”

Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for Ministry, our UU seminary in San Francisco, writes that the liberal religious imagination “sees change coming through an evolutionary process—the gradual dismantling of (unjust and corrupt systems) and the eventual unfolding of life into greater forms of beauty and justice.” She writes:  “I have done my share of calling for the end of evil empires and announcing that the promised land is just around the corner, but I have come to believe that we need to let go of this religious myth….  As we enter the new millennium, we need to see ourselves as people living in the aftermath of cataclysmic violence …, focusing our attention on the marks of past violence in our personal and collective experience.  We must notice the breakdown, sorrow, and legacies of injustice that characterize our current world order…. we must discover how we can live among the ruins.  The task is to walk among the ruins, find what can be saved, and gather up materials to rebuild…. The religious enterprise can be imagined as a kind of salvage work, recognizing the resources that sustain and restore life… tending to injury in ourselves and others, collecting resources buried in the rubble, and constructing shelters for body and spirit, family and community” (Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, 2006).

Rebecca Parker offers three healing practices.  First, truth-telling:  We who use language have a tendency to confuse our words with reality.  For example: we love humanity, but its people we can’t stand!  I remember hearing about the attack that took place in our Knoxville church one Sunday morning, killing two and injuring others.  I was at a meeting of Unitarian Universalist ministers, and one of them began singing—perhaps wishful singing:  “I’ve got peace like a river… in my soul.”  I couldn’t sing that!  The words did not match reality until we sang, “I’ve got pain like an arrow….”

The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah called for truth-telling when he said:  “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, `Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11).  Perhaps Ebenezer Scrooge was onto something when he refused to pretend that kindness, compassion and generosity exist in a world that allows a destitute underclass to suffer eleven months of the year, denigrating them as lazy, criminal and unworthy freeloaders, and then on Christmas, suddenly to cheerily wish them joy and peace, offering a “Merry Christmas” along with a free bird and toys for the kids!  Charles Dickens wanted more reality in his Christmas.  He said, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to live it all the year.”

Most every Sunday, I celebrate our Unitarian Universalist covenant as articulated in the Principles, that we promise to be a safe place for each person’s integrity, so that no one need leave a part of themselves at the door.  To welcome everyone warmly, is our promise, our aspiration, our ongoing discipline.  It is not automatic.  If, for example, our practice is to make smokers feel uncomfortable, or if AA folks are confronted by alcohol at all our social occasions, we are only nominally welcoming.  Actions speak louder than words.  The challenge is to make our words real with each newcomer to our doors, with each hidden part of ourselves that we discover.  To simply say we “promise our mutual trust and support,” does not make it so.

Rebecca Parker recommended a second healing practice: salvaging.  Unitarian Universalism celebrates many Sources from which we have our diverse religious sentiments.  The final words of our covenant statement of Principles read:  “Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision….” Personally, I enjoy the enriching and ennobling diversity of UU religious pluralism.  But Rebecca Parker challenges us to be more than religious consumers, dilettantes.  She challenges us to “sift through the rubble and determine what needs to be saved” from among the world’s wisdom traditions.  “Judge what gives life and what oppresses.” She writes: “We need the Sabbath candles, the house of study, the bread of communion, the silence of sitting, the teachings of Jesus, the dance of Sufis, the body-rhythm of gospel singing, the word of prayer, the narratives of the soul’s dark night, the cross, and the ox-herding pictures.” We may come to Unitarian Universalism with our personal religious or irreligious sentiments.  Our work is to sort through and salvage those healing and life-giving elements from those less helpful in healing relationships and in rebuilding communities of mutual trust and support.

Third, Rebecca Parker recommends a counter-intuitive approach to spiritual leadership.  She writes:  “The guides we should heed are those whom William James called `twice born,’ people who have grappled with suffering, loss, and oppression and found a way to survive, such as African American women; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people; and those who have recovered from addiction… those who are present with us, bearing the scars of suffering and survival.”

Although we love to sing of “Peace on earth, to all goodwill,” the work of Christmas is more real and more rewarding than winter wonderlands and Christmas card sentimentality.  Rebecca Parker writes:  “In our time, hope (the work of Christmas) means not running away from the icy, hard ground of suffering, violence, injustice, and deceit.  It means savoring the sweetness of human love, lighting the Sabbath candles, smelling the spices, and opening our hearts to the sources of refreshment and grace that are given to us.  Survival means reconstructing from the ruins a world of hospitality and peace.  It means living as one of those who, as Adrienne Rich says, `with no extraordinary power, reconstitutes the world.’”

May the work of generous, compassionate loving-kindness continue all year round!

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Being Peace”
Rev. Rod Debs
December 12, 2010

Listen to the podcast (mp3)

A number of the Founders of our nation were Unitarians:  John Adams was a member of the Quincy, MA, congregation of Unitarians.  Thomas Jefferson identified himself in his private letters as Unitarian.  The elder statesman of our nation’s Founders, Benjamin Franklin was a member of Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian Chapel in London, England.

This is important because the Founders of our nation believed in “the right of conscience.”  They had seen religious coercion and even violent religious discrimination practiced in the American colonies.  The Anglicans in Virginia were especially brutal in their suppression of Baptists.  So the Founders wanted the new nation to guarantee religious freedom, the right of conscience and religious integrity.

Benjamin Franklin became very influential throughout the colonies because of his common-sense advice published in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Speaking of peace, Franklin’s advice reads:  “He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.”

Franklin’s advice is to “keep your own council” rather than to contradict or set straight everyone you think is in error.  At his place in history, science and reason were daily contradicting popular views.  Without even disputing with anyone, Franklin was called a devil by clergy because his invention of the lightning-rod had saved many homes from burning.  Some clergy believed that Franklin’s invention thwarted God’s intended punishment of the wicked by burning their barns, businesses or homes.  Better to avoid endless disputation and let the evidence speak for itself.  Better to resist judging others’ beliefs and behaviors, and, at most, ask, “How is that working for you?”

One of the favorite Christmas carols this holiday season tells of angels appearing to shepherds:  “… `Peace on the earth, to all good will, from heaven the news we bring.’  The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing” (Singing the Living Tradition, #244).  I am reminded of the words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah who declared, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, `Peace, peace’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).

Kids sometimes watch sporting competitions and dream of receiving the huge trophy.  Alright, I love trophies myself as you can see from these that Katrina and I won for our rabbits years ago.  We dream of winning the big game, performing before thousands, receiving the parchment that we can hang on our wall with letters after our name!

But do I love the process of getting there?  Feeding and watering the rabbits day after day after day come rain or snow, building cages and shoveling waste, breeding and keeping meticulous pedigrees, with lots of rabbits showing poorly.  How many aspiring football heroes dream of the process of running stadium steps, the bruises and sprains and injuries of practice?  Or is it making the winning touchdown, holding high the trophy, receiving praise of peers we want.

Politicians, preachers and well-wishers declare:  “Peace be with you” and “Peace on earth to all goodwill,” but do we celebrate the work that makes for peace, the work of justice and of compassion?

The prophet Jeremiah declared:  “To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear?  Behold their ears are closed, they cannot listen;…” (6:10) “… among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men…. Their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek.  They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy” (6:26-28). “For from the least to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, `Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (6:13-14).

Perhaps we should not be greeting or singing of peace this holiday season, but saying, “Compassion be with you,” and sing:  “Justice on the earth, to all goodwill…”.  No.  We prefer dreaming of the trophy more than visualizing the work required to make it so.

This morning I will not focus on just social policies that build peace.  If you wish you can look up the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission and the eight Millennium Development Goals necessary for peace:  1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; 2) Achieve universal primary education; 3) Promote gender equality and empower women; 4) Reduce child mortality rate; 5) Improve maternal health; 6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; 7) Ensure environmental sustainability; 8) Develop a global partnership for development.

Locally, I believe we are already at work at Peacebuilding in our local community by our work together and individually in support of Opportunity Place, Shelter House, and Sharing and Caring of Niceville and of Fort Walton Beach, to name the most obvious.  I believe that many in our community recognize the truth of the saying, “If you want peace, work for justice.”  We are engaged in seeking to extend the privileges we enjoy in our nation to ever greater numbers of marginalized and disenfranchised people.  Right now, I will not “preach to the choir” on social justice.

The spiritual insight where the rubber of relationships hits the road is expressed by Ben Franklin:  “He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.” Do we believe that we will build peace in our relationships with neighbors and coworkers by abstaining from disputation and from judging?  If we do avoid confrontation, if we refuse to stand up against what we judge to be mistaken and ill-advised, are we simply “going along to get along”?  Is there a way to engage others that facilitates spiritual growth on our part as well as theirs?  Emily Dickinson clarifies Franklin’s advice for living “in peace and at ease” with others:

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

“As Lightning to the Children eased
With Explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every (one) be blind—“

I confess, over the years I have sharpened my sword for intellectual battle with intimidating religious dogmatists.  I have my zingers.  I could characterize the blood redemption plan that God’s only begotten son die on the cross in sacrifice for the sins of the world—I could call it, “divine child abuse.”  Touche’!   I could ask what kind of a God cannot accept His sinful children, as we human parents forgive our children without the barbaric brutality of blood sacrifice?

Speaking with those who read the Bible according to modern literal interpretations, what about Balaam’s talking donkey in Numbers 22?  “Do you really believe Balaam’s donkey talked?”  Do they read John 1:29 literally that Jesus is the “Lamb of God”—complete with wool and little hooves!  I’ve got my little “gotchas.”

My experience is that such arguments don’t really work.  Rather, “success in circuit lies,” toning down these “gotchas” so that others don’t feel like I am trying to destroy their faith.  Whatever we say in dialogue with people of diverse faiths, will cause pain and alienate unless it is tempered by compassion, unless we “tell it slant.”

In talking with people of other faiths including Biblical literalists, I have more success in asking about and listening to the meaning of their faith, and finding what I can affirm in another’s religious sentiments.  Each of us must have “the right of conscience” to believe what our integrity demands of us, and that means fundamentalists too.

The World Peace Newsletter offers this insight:

“When we are selfish and judgmental, we fail both separately and together.

When we all give, we ALL receive. We get what we give. Give hate and anger, get war and poverty. Give love and compassion, get peace and prosperity. That is the way of both the individual and the world.

“Peace is not merely the absence of war and hatred… but also the presence of cooperation, compassion and worldwide justice” (www.worldpeacenewsletter.com).

So much is said about creating peace in the heart as well as peace in the nations.  But it’s not the goal, the trophy at the end that will bring success.  It is the path of peace, the process of acting with compassion and cooperation and justice that will build inner peace, relational peace and global peace.

It is the practice of loving-kindness that overcomes all differences, that heals all wounds, that puts to flight all fears, and that reconciles all who are separated (Frederick Gillis, adapted).

Though many say our nation is a Christian nation, and certainly Christianity has shaped much of our nation’s character for good or ill, nevertheless, the hearts of our nation’s peoples are diverse in religious sentiments regardless of what church the attend or don’t attend, regardless of the beliefs they articulate or reject.  Ours is a gloriously interfaith and secular society, a wonderful society in which to explore and bless one another’s faiths.

May we walk the path of compassion, kindness and mutual respect and know peace in all our relationships that goes far beyond holiday sentimentality.

“Go forth in fellowship—that quality of relationship among human beings that respects, listens, and invites hidden possibilities, and gently summons each to our better selves.”