Master of my Fate Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 01/04/09

(Story for All Ages: If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss)

Readings 1. From Paul’s Letter to the Romans (7:15, 19, 21, 25b) in the New Testament, New Revised Standard Version:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do...I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand…So then with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

2. “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903):

OUT of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Sermon I start each New Year with the spirit of William Ernest Henley. As I optimistically commit myself to positive change, new and healthy routines, helpful tasks and generous acts that will be accomplished daily and creative endeavors that will be engaged over the long haul, I feel that I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul; I do run the zoo, and I’ve got plans!

Around January 15th, I feel a little less optimistic, and spend a lot of time saying to myself, “Ok, starting now…” But things get in the way. Circumstances conspire against me. I may still be the captain of my soul, but we are heading into harsh weather and I cannot promise to stay precisely on course. Master of my Fate UUCSEA 01/04/09 Richards / 2 of 5

By the end of the month, when it is clear that best intentions do not equate to positive outcomes and that I can no longer blame everything on things and circumstances, I am crying out along with Paul: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want…” (Which brings to mind a quip from comedian Emo Phillips quoted by Daniel Dennett in his book on free will: “I’m not a fatalist,” he said, “but even if I were, what could I do about it?”) (pg. 12)

And it raises the question: just how much do we have control over in our lives? Are we masters or slaves? Do we guide our destiny, or are we simply along for the ride? And why do these questions matter to us?

And they do seem to matter. There is some reason that untold amounts of time have been spent grappling with the questions of freedom and responsibility within the spheres of religion (where the questions arise within words and phrases like predestination and God’s will), philosophy and science (where the questions arise in discussions of determinism and inevitability) and in politics and popular culture (where we find it implicit in such phrases as Change We Can Believe In or 30 Days to a New You or, conversely, that’s just how I am or some things never change).

And it is fun to explore the mountains of literature on free will and determinism and compatibilism and on and on. Just type in “free will” to Google and peruse the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. Or pick up a copy of “Freedom Evolves” by Daniel Dennett and read as he redefines free will in terms of evolutionary biology. It’s great stuff that I can’t begin to summarize in a sermon…

But why does it matter? Why am I tackling this in a sermon anyway?

Well, it’s a new year, for one thing. It’s a time when these questions are raised within the very practical context of our plans for the future and our reflections on the past. Maybe we wonder what might have happened if we had chosen the road not taken. Maybe we question the direction we seem to be headed. Maybe we just wish to view some new scenery and need to alter our course. Can we? Should we? Will we? Or won’t we?

(In an online interview, Daniel Dennett, responding to a question on free will from an evolutionary perspective, asked the questioner to first define what he meant by free will. A little exasperated, the interviewer replied, “Well, you know…I want to know if I am able to alter the future!” “And which future would you like to alter?” Dennett replied.)

Which future would you like to alter? We wish to know that we have the ability to change from what apparently will happen if we don’t alter our behavior, but we have no real way of knowing if this is not the future that was determined all along, banking on the simple fact that we would come to a place of wishing to alter a future that was not going to happen in the first place thanks to our realization about how we wanted to change the future that we expected to happen if we didn’t change. Got that?

I think that our problems with resolutions have less to do with our notions of free will than with our illusions about our spheres of control. We get into a lot of trouble thinking that we should be able to control things that we can’t and abdicating responsibility of those things that we say we can’t control even though we can. It is no wonder that what is known as the Serenity Prayer has gained such popularity:

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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can ; And the wisdom to know the difference.

Separating and clarifying those can be important: things I cannot change and things I can. Many of you know that this prayer is a staple of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and other recovery groups. We addicts, as out of control as our lives become, have a problem letting go of the illusion that we can control things that are simply beyond our control, which leads to the tortuous logic of addiction. Here’s a simple example: You persist in doing things that I don’t like, so I have to drink. I use the excuse of being unable to control that which is uncontrollable by me (your behavior) to justify my lack of control over that which is in my control (my drinking).

And though I am talking about addiction in this case, I think that this logic may even filter out to the rest of the world in various formulations. It is raining this morning, so I can’t take my walk today. I use the excuse of being unable to control that which is uncontrollable by me (the rain) to justify my lack of control over that which is in my control (my walk). Now I’m not saying that I want to necessarily get drenched on my walk, but there are umbrellas, raincoats…or I could take a walk when it quits raining, which presumably might happen within the same day.

And this is maybe not so serious if it is just one day, but in a fairly short if illogical step it can turn into, “What’s the use of walking? It always rains when I’m about to go.”

And after all is said and done, I may decide that the reason I’m not walking is because I never wanted to walk in the first place…and that will bring a clarity in regard to my will and motivation that will never be clear as long as I am attributing my actions to something outside my control.

I am a fan of the Serenity Prayer. I love the way that it moves back and forth between what we can change and what we cannot change without clarifying anything about what those might be. We are left with this question that moves, like most truth moves, along with our lives, and we are left asking ourselves which is which. And having this question before us helps to clarify what it is that we truly want.

Personally, and speaking very generally on behalf of the human race, I think that we get into most trouble when we imagine that we can change things that we can’t. To be the master of my fate, as we are all indisputably caught in this network of interdependence, I decide that I must also be master of your fate. But you, understandably, have other plans. Frustrated by my vain attempts in that direction (changing you), I become so disillusioned and apathetic that I don’t try to change the things that are within my power to change (changing me).

And though the prayer has found a receptive audience in the recovery and self-help movements pointed toward individual spiritual growth, it is interesting to note that its original purpose in the mind of its author, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, appears to have been much more directed towards political action and social ethics.

Here is the prayer in its original form as written by Niebuhr:

God grant us the grace to Accept with serenity that which we cannot change Master of my Fate UUCSEA 01/04/09 Richards / 4 of 5

The courage to change what should be changed And the wisdom to distinguish one from another.

First off, you’ll notice the first-person plural…not just “me” but “us.” Not just “I” but “we.” And though we ask for the grace to accept with serenity that which we cannot change, we also ask for the courage to change what should be changed. Should implies that we have made a moral judgment about what is. In the popular version of the prayer, I ask for courage to change the things I can, the implication being that I have already made the judgment that they should be changed. Niebuhr, who also wrote a volume entitled “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” made the should explicit.

And how do we decide what should be changed on a societal level. More importantly, how do we convince ourselves that it is something that can be changed?

I said earlier that a distinct problem on the personal level for many people is convincing themselves that they can change things that they really have no control over. On a societal level, I think a big problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves we have no ability to change things that we can change. Here, too, the Serenity Prayer asks us to think deeply about what we must accept and what we must work to change.

Elizabeth Sifton, daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr, in a book entitled The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in the Time of Peace and War, places an important event in the story of the formation of that prayer right here in Arizona; in fact, just down the road in Bisbee, Arizona. Two men who would later become great friends of Niebuhr, Felix Frankfurter and Walter Douglas, played important roles in the tragic strike-breaking and deportation that took place in 1917, standing up to the copper owners and the politicians that supported them.

Felix Frankfurter, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice, was a young law graduate who was sent to Bisbee by President Wilson to sort out the many different claims between the mine owners, managers, and strikers. He calmly presented a report that Phelps Dodge and its president Walter Douglas, local law enforcement and hired thugs were the cause of violence and not the strikers. Will Scarlet, who would later become an Episcopal Bishop, Dean of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix at the time, was the only prominent Arizona clergyman on the side of labor. James S. Douglas—known to some as “Rawhide Jimmy,” son of Dr. James Douglas, the founder of the Copper Queen Mine, purportedly visited the Bishop in Arizona demanding Scarlett’s immediate dismissal or the mining bosses would sue the Episcopal church.

Sifton saw these events as formative for the creation of a group consisting of church leaders and prominent labor and social activists that included her father, who supported each other as they fought against oppression and injustice in this country and articulated that struggle in moral and theological terms. The Serenity Prayer was one such articulation, one which managed to survive and inspire countless people since.

I think that it is important for us, at this time, to recapture the oft-neglected history of that prayer, as described by Niebuhr’s daughter. Now that circumstances have unalterably changed that economy which we had begun to accept as unchanging; now that we must face the previously unimaginable effects of climate change and diminishing resources; now that the election has opened up possibility that we may have previously thought impossible; wouldn’t this be the perfect time to reassess our notions of that which we cannot change and that which we should change? What better time to reach out for grace and serenity and courage all at once? What better time to open ourselves to the wisdom that is offered Master of my Fate UUCSEA 01/04/09 Richards / 5 of 5 by this mystery we call life? What better time to question the inevitability of war and oppression and injustice? What better time to ask what changes could occur if we, a network of humans across the globe, in a vibrant participatory democratic way, ran the zoo?

Rather than picturing ourselves as masters of our fate or slaves to a predetermined destiny, what if we imagined ourselves to be fellow workers constructing a new society with greater freedom for every sort of unique individual; changing things with the full recognition that we are dependent upon the Sun and the Earth and interdependent with all of life? What if, rather than seeking to answer all the abstract questions, we kept the questions before us and allowed the answer to flow from our actions?

William E. Henley, the author of Invictus, did not lead a charmed life. He was not writing from a triumphant position, declaring himself master of his fate. He had tuberculosis from the age of 12 leading to the amputation of one leg. He suffered health problems throughout his life, as well as other family tragedies and financial difficulties. It seems to me that what he claimed to “master” was not the circumstances of his life, but his responses to them. He continued on despite hardship. He retained hope despite disappointment. As we face the challenges that await us, may we proceed in just such a courageous fashion…and may we find support and encouragement from one another as we make our way.

Playing the Race Card Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 01/11/09

Opening Words – (Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, Responsive Reading #576 in Singing the Living Tradition) If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation. If you are black and I am white, It will not matter. If you are female and I am male, It will not matter. If you are older and I am younger, It will not matter. If you are progressive and I am conservative, It will not matter. If you are straight and I am gay, It will not matter. If you are Christian and I am Jewish, It will not matter. If we join spirits as brothers and sisters, the pain of our aloneness will be lessened, and that does matter. In this spirit, we build community and move toward restoration.

Sermon In only a matter of days, the first African American President of the United States of America will be sworn into office. Of the many things that historians may record about this moment in time, this fact will certainly be one of the most prominent. There is no denying the magnitude of this event, as a man who once would have been considered property in this country will now become its President; a person who once might have worked to build the White House as a slave will now enter it as a leader; a person who would once have been refused service at a diner because of the color of his skin will now be representing all of us as he dines with world leaders.

There is no mistaking the power of this moment. We, as a country, can feel proud, and that pride is felt even by those who may not have voted for Obama who yet still celebrate what this means for our nation.

What does it mean for our nation? For our communities? For our congregation? For each of us, as individuals? The election of an African American President is a great symbol of progress in our struggle toward racial equality…but symbols can be misinterpreted. Rather than inspirations to action they can become substitutes; rather than focusing our energies, they can distract us from the realities they are meant to represent. In a congregation and a liberal religious tradition that forthrightly commits itself to justice and equity in human relations, race is an issue that we cannot afford to ignore or avoid or oversimplify.

And the reason this is so important now is that some would like to use this election, not as an opportunity for more open and honest dialogue about racism, but as a gag order for precisely these issues.

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Let me give you a couple examples:

Dinesh D’Souza wrote this when Obama was nominated as the Democratic Candidate in August of 2008:

Who could not be moved at the sight of a major political party naming Barack Obama, an African American, as its presidential candidate? To me, there could not be a better sign that America has left behind its racist past. We are now approaching what may be termed "the end of racism."

We’ve left behind our racist past? Hey, swell, that was getting a little heavy to keep carrying. And now we’re approaching the end of racism…Glad that’s over. That wasn’t any fun at all…And there’s no wonder that D’Souza is so excited about “the end of racism,” which he hurries to explain in his next sentence:

The End of Racism was the title of my 1995 bestseller, hugely controversial when it was published, but now it seems to have been a decade ahead of its time.

Now this is interesting logic in itself. If you declare that something has ended and it really hasn’t ended, you’re not wrong, you’re simply ahead of your time. Something on the order of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq…or Former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, asked about the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden, responding that it was not so much a failure as “a success that hasn’t occurred yet.”

A November 5th opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal celebrated the fact that “[a] man of mixed race has now reached the pinnacle of U.S. power only two generations since the end of Jim Crow.”

Calling this “a tribute to American opportunity,” the article went on to say that “Mr. Obama has a special obligation” to help “put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”

Put to rest the myth of racism? Gee, and we hope Mr. Obama puts that myth to rest in the first hundred days, because we don’t want to have to deal with people whining about racism anymore, right?

If we’re claiming that racism has been ended, let’s just say that it’s a success that hasn’t happened yet. Better yet, let’s face up to the fact that we haven’t achieved success…and let’s not call it a failure, either. Rather, let’s renew our efforts to address the undeniable scars and ongoing hurts of racism with a renewed energy and honesty. Let’s take advantage of the greater space that has been offered for us to truly come together. Let’s take this opportunity to listen to one another, no matter how uncomfortable the conversation becomes.

And the conversation can become uncomfortable…so uncomfortable that, like other such charged issues, it seems that comedians are about the only public figures that dare to touch it.

African American comedian Dave Chappelle--whose mother was the first African American woman to be ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 1981—Dave Chappelle does a controversial skit about a blind black man, Clayton Bigsby, who is also a white supremacist. Having never seen the color of his own skin, he vents his prejudicial views loudly, making all of his listeners squirm in discomfort, of course. Playing the Race Card UUCSEA 01/11/09 Richards / 3 of 5

And that squirming is important, I think. Racism, and racial stereotypes, and the cultural conditioning that has built up around the issues of race should make us squirm. But if we never get real about it, we will never understand the anger and the anguish, we will never have a chance of building real community, we will never have a more perfect union. If we don’t reflect on our own reality, not our idealized version of ourselves, we risk perpetuating the damage and despair into the future.

A January 8th CNN news story reads: “A new study published Thursday in the journal Science suggests many people unconsciously harbor racist attitudes, even though they see themselves as tolerant and egalitarian.” Without going into the details of the study, though I urge you to check it out, suffice to say that the conclusions were troubling, especially for a country where some are eager to play “taps” for the very notion that racism exists. Kerry Kawasaki, associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario and lead author of the study, said, “Some people might think…they don’t have to deal with their prejudices, and that’s not related to them at all, when in actual fact they hold these hidden biases.”

Anglo American comedian Stephen Colbert frequently proclaims himself impervious to racism as he is totally colorblind: “I just don’t see color…I don’t. Are you black?” he asks guests. “I really wouldn’t know; I don’t see color…Am I black? I could be. I don’t know.”

We can laugh, maybe a little uneasily, with these comedians, but the challenge is clear.

Are we really colorblind? Should that even be a goal? In an exchange that occurred in a class at theological school, I heard a white student, with the best of intentions, say, “It doesn’t matter to me what color you are. I’m colorblind.” A black student replied, “You can afford to be colorblind. You’re white.”

You can afford to be. You can afford to pretend it doesn’t matter. You can afford to make believe that racism is someone else’s problem if you’re white.

Now let me say: I think that I understand the intention of claiming colorblindness. Not unlike African American UU Minister, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley in our Opening Words, we wish to say:

If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation. If you are black and I am white, it will not matter.

It will not matter. We want to scream it out: It should not matter, so it will not matter. I don’t even think about color. I don’t even see it.

But, listen, denial has never been the way to healthy community. It doesn’t help to avoid our own histories. And it’s amazing how quickly we can bury them, because to unearth them feels painful, feels dangerous, feels traitorous, even.

I was struck by this passage in the speech that Barak Obama gave in March of 2008 describing his grandmother: a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who Playing the Race Card UUCSEA 01/11/09 Richards / 4 of 5 passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Cringing. Squirming. In any discussion of racism, my first impulse is to place myself firmly on the correct side of the argument. I wish to distance myself as far as possible from ignorance and discrimination. I read the CNN report on the study that uncovered racist behavior in self-described enlightened people and think: I wouldn’t have acted like those people; meaning: I hope I wouldn’t have acted like those people; meaning: I’m at least a little scared that I may have acted like those people. I read Obama’s description of cringing at the words of the grandmother he loved, and I remember back to a story that’s almost too embarrassing to tell…almost…but if we are to do the work of community, we must be honest.

I grew up in Sioux Falls, SD, a very white town, I had very little exposure to African Americans, but somewhere I, a sponge like all children are, soaked up the assumptions of the culture in which I lived. We moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa when I was six years old and happened to rent a house next to an African American family. I was awed by the whole process of moving to a new place. I was frightened and excited by the prospect of meeting new people. And I was struck by the neatness, the normality of the house next door where the African American family lived. My six year old self blurted out, with innocent sincerity although the words dripped with the ignorance and brutality of prejudice, I said, “They’re black…but they’re clean.”

They’re black…but they’re clean. A shameful, ignorant thing to say…and what’s worse is that it became a story told in the family as some kind of wise saying, as some kind of generous acceptance of the fact that, of course, blacks could be as clean and good and normal as whites. And I think: where did that come from? Where did I get that? It couldn’t have been there, in my home, among my family, could it? Not us. We were just regular people…but it was there. It was there, unseen: like lead in paint; like carbon monoxide in the air; an invisible poison, and it was there.

It’s a story, and not only a story but a piece of my life, that makes me cringe; makes me squirm. Further, it feels treacherous and traitorous as it indicts my family, the people that I love, just as Obama loved the grandmother who sometimes made him cringe. But it’s a story that I have to tell if I am to see clearly the effect that a racist society has had on this life, intertwined and tangled with so many others. Racism does not only rear its head in this society when a person of color is called a name, turned down for a job, or harassed, beaten or even killed by the police, although it can be clearly active in such circumstances. It has become part of the air that we breathe, part of the food that we eat, part of the unspoken education of a society that imagines it can outrun its racist past, and it will not magically disappear if we simply clamp our eyes shut and wish. We need to help each other identify the effects of racism and prejudice and ignorance, the scars that have been left on our lives, so that we can move forward together. We can’t waste energy on denial. We can’t disguise ourselves behind our colorblind glasses.

Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley did not say: If we strive not to see one another’s color, if you are black and I am white, it will not matter. She did not say: if we rewrite our history, if you are black and I am white, it will not matter. She did not say: if we pretend there are no problems and that we have no unresolved feelings, if you are black and I am white, it will not matter. She said: If we strive to build community…And community can only be built upon honest communication.

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Marianne Williamson—some of you may know her as the creator of the Course in Miracles—when she was minister at Renaissance Unity Interfaith Spiritual Fellowship facilitated a discussion with writer, professor, speaker, and Minister Michael Eric Dyson which appears in a book called "Debating Race.” Here is a piece of that conversation:

"Love is not this namby-pamby passive thing. Love is present when real communication is present...So beloved community—[when Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked the beloved community—that] is not a static thing; it's a process. And when a community is not yet beloved, it's not going to get beloved by fear...Being beloved doesn't mean you agree; it means you're going to stay there for the conversation."

Responding to the uproar over the words of United Church of Christ minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President-elect Obama spoke in March 2008, of “the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” My concern is that his very election may lead us to oversimplify those complexities; that we may now judge that part of our union as perfect enough. And if we do so, we will do so at the expense of genuine community. If we do so, we will do so at the expense of the true promise of this nation.

“If we walk away now,” Obama said, “if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American…what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another.”

So may it be.

Change We Can Believe In Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 01/25/09

Opening Words – (#602 Singing the Living Tradition, Lao-Tse) If there is to be peace in the world, There must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, There must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, There must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, There must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, There must be peace in the heart.

Readings 1. From The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War by Elisabeth Sifton (pg. 316):

Realism…meant being aware of inevitable human failing, whether in domestic affairs or in foreign policy. Nations, like all communities like any church or political gathering, cannot presume an absolute claim on truth, rectitude, virtue, force, or power. Democratic debate—discussion, dispute, inquiry—was an essential component in the formulation of policies and plans…for democracy’s leaders must always take account of the contingent human errors that will inevitably alter what we do. Open, tolerant, engaged respect for the differences among us is essential. There is no freedom without it.

2. From President Obama’s Inaugural Address: Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

Sermon The Buddhist says to the hot dog vendor, “Can you make me one with everything?”

You may have only heard that much of the story…there’s more. The vendor seems to ignore the playful double entendre of the request, and proceeds to load a hot dog with onions and relish and ketchup and mustard and sauerkraut—everything!—and hands it to the Buddhist. The Buddhist then hands the vendor a $20. And he waits.

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As he has spent a lifetime practicing meditation he is pretty good at waiting patiently and calmly, but the hot dog vendor now seems to be totally oblivious of his presence. So finally the Buddhist, restraining his irritation as best he can, breathes deeply and asks: “Excuse me, but don’t I get some change?”

And the vendor replies, “Ah, change must come from within.”

Change must come from within.

If we condense Lao Tzu’s sequence of events in the Reading, you must have peace in the heart to have peace in the world, and if peace does not start there then the whole thing crumbles like a proverbial house of cards. Mahatma Gandhi said, Be the change you wish to see. Change—resounds the chorus of prophetic and profound voices, including the clever hot dog vendor—change must come from within.

And that, for me, is something of a frightening prospect. The world needs changing and if it has to wait for me to change, we might be in some trouble. And yet, if the change that we seek is not securely anchored in the depths of our individual souls, where will this change lead us? What can we expect?

The “change” that is in the air; the “change” that lies at the heart of the excitement that we saw in the nearly unimaginable crowds at the inauguration of Barak Obama; the “change” that has caused some of us to believe that this society, rather than provoking us to respond thoughtlessly from our fears, can inspire us by reflecting our most deeply-held values …we have to know that this “change” will be seized and packaged and used in all sort of ways: to make money, to maneuver political benefit, to manipulate public opinion, to convince, to obscure, to defeat, to sell…

Shepard Fairey, creator of the famous Obama Hope poster, has been hired by Saks Fifth Avenue to create a whole new campaign for them based on Soviet propaganda posters (I kid you not!) with the theme: “Want it!” Pepsi, whose logo bears striking similarities to the Obama campaign’s logo, is asking people to post videos to their site lending their suggestions to President-elect Obama on how he might “refresh America.” Hundreds of articles have gone to print talking about the “Obama-branding,” analyzing marketing techniques, logo designs, and even font choices that helped to “sell” the message and the man to the American people.

And I’m not saying this from any moral indignation about the advertising industry. I’m not saying this to promote some naïve dream about purifying political campaigns of corporate influence and the savage dictates of a market economy. I’m not saying this to accuse anyone of selling out. I’m not even saying, “Isn’t this terrible that this happens?” It is happening. It will happen. I say it only so that we can raise our awareness, and so we can separate Change: the Slogan, Change: the Logo; Change: the Advertisement—separate all of those from the change we can believe in.

And much more insidious than any transparent marketing campaign is the way that some are trying to package and sell the appearance of change to avoid talking about the substance of change. There are those--those who have a stake in the system as we have known it--who would love to see the inaugural celebration as a closing celebration of a movement. “Here you go; this is the change you wanted; now go home and let us take care of things from here.” I think that we should pay heed to the words of President Obama himself:

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. Change We Can Believe In UUCSEA 01/25/09 Richards / 3 of 5

This is not the end of our work. This is the opportunity for work, meaningful work that may help to change things. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. And that cannot happen if we don’t make our voices heard. And that cannot happen if we imagine that change is now on auto- pilot.

There was an interesting exchange in a discussion on Bill Moyers Journal this last Friday evening. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University, said that she had been investigating the meaning of the Martin Luther King holiday in the new Obama era, and she had a photograph of President Lyndon Johnson with Martin Luther King, Jr., that she would show to people and ask them: if they could superimpose Barak Obama’s face on this picture, where would it go? Many people answered, “Oh, well, King” and she would say, “No, no, no…Barak Obama’s LBJ in this picture. We’ve elected him to the U.S. presidency.

“So the missing image is who will play the role of King?” she told Myers, “Because, in fact, the president needs Kings. I actually think it's plural. It's not a single King.”

And Moyers replies, “You mean they need agitators out there…who are pressing them to do the right thing. As Lyndon Johnson said to Martin Luther King — go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.”

“Exactly,” she said. Exactly.

They—our leaders—they need agitators out there who are pressing them to do the right thing. More than our approval or disapproval in the latest poll, our leaders need our help and our insistence on what is right and our commitment to holding them (and ourselves) accountable.

And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

The way things were. The way things are. That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change. Because now we see cracks in the wall of what is. Things that never change are changing. It is not pretty, nor simple, nor the way we might have chosen, but it is real.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood, said President Obama in his Inaugural Address, and he proceeded to tick off a list that hardly seemed designed to give one hope: Our nation is at war…Our economy is badly weakened…Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

And I think of the prayer from Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant us the grace to Accept with serenity that which we cannot change The courage to change what should be changed And the wisdom to distinguish one from another.

Change We Can Believe In UUCSEA 01/25/09 Richards / 4 of 5

One of the greatest obstacles to constructive change is our own certainty about what we cannot change, which is why a time of great upheaval like the one in which we find ourselves provides an opportune time to revisit those questions.

I love this prayer, the Serenity Prayer, but I’d like to rename it, for today at least, as The Change Prayer. Serenity is one piece of it, but the theme that carries throughout is change.

I believe that, as Unitarian Universalists, we have much to offer to this discussion about change. In a certain respect, we have created a religion that is characterized by change and we have a responsibility to clarify and defend its contours. We are creed-less; we have no unchangeable statement of belief; we leave space so that our vision can extend beyond the limitations of the present; we explicitly open ourselves to challenges that we cannot now foresee. Universalist minister, L.B. Fisher, addressing where Universalists stood on particular issues, famously said, “The only true answer to give to this question is we don’t stand at all; we move.” But what guides our movement?

That’s what the Pope wants to know. Pope Benedict, though he has been criticized for making attacks on Islam and many other groups, has one major target in terms of his religious philosophy: relativism. In case you didn’t know, we are included in that attack. Not having a firm creed to stand upon, he would say, we are left exposed to the winds of change and end up with a self-serving, “anything goes” philosophy that cannot nurture the spirit nor create positive change in the world.

I think that we should take his criticism seriously. I’m not saying that we should accept it, but treat it as a healthy warning. And think about how we might respond.

If we have opened ourselves to change, it is not simply change for the sake of change. We do not open ourselves to change so that we can garner approval from the powers that be; it is not so that we can strike the proper contemporary pose. We do not open ourselves to change so that we can conform to the prevailing culture, but so that our prophetic voice can speak clearly to that culture and work to transform that culture. We do not open ourselves to change so that we can avoid commitment to anything in particular, but so that we can commit ourselves more directly to the moral struggles of today.

We explicitly open ourselves to the possibility of change, even opening our Principles and Sources to the possibility of revision, because we know that no single formulation or understanding or articulation of our purpose will serve for all times and places. We explicitly open ourselves to the possibility of change because we are “aware of inevitable human failing.” We explicitly open ourselves to the possibility of change because we “cannot presume an absolute claim on truth, rectitude, virtue, force, or power.” We explicitly open ourselves to the possibility of change because we “must always take account of the contingent human errors that will inevitably alter what we do.” We explicitly open ourselves to the possibility of change because our commitment to the burning core at the heart of our mission in the liberal religious tradition--which is to discover and share more love, justice, peace—that commitment does not change. The purpose means far more than the proclamation and we can’t let the purpose be hindered because we have fallen in love with our present understanding of how it may be achieved. We open ourselves to the possibility of change because we realize that the changes that we nurture within ourselves are part of an ongoing and ever-renewing process and practice, while the changes that we seek to effect in the wider world are part of an ongoing responsibility that calls for constant reexamination.

Change We Can Believe In UUCSEA 01/25/09 Richards / 5 of 5

And though it may be true that change must come from within, we don’t have the luxury of working on one change at a time. If the change we work towards in society must first be born within, it is also true that the change born within us must find expression in our society. The English economic historian, R. H. Tawney wrote: “Obviously religion is a ‘thing of the Spirit.’ But the social order is also a thing of the spirit. The forms of economic organization which a society establishes, the property rights which it maintains, the relations between its members which it sanctions—these things…reflect its scale of moral preferences.”

What if we claimed the power of this tentatively-renamed Change Prayer and pledged ourselves to change what should—what must—be changed? What if we took up the call to a new era of responsibility “firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

We may find ourselves building a land where justice shall roll down like waters and peace like an ever- flowing stream. We may find that this old world can be a garden. We may find ourselves building for tomorrow a nobler world than we have known today.

We may find ourselves participating in that which we would not have previously believed possible…not just change, but change we can believe in.

The Planet of Love Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 02/08/09

The evening star. And the morning star. Both are Venus. The ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks believed them to be two separate bodies so they had different names for each. In Latin, Vesper was the evening star (as in Vespers Service) and the morning star was…Lucifer.

Lucifer. There’s a familiar name. Lucifer, in this context, meant, simply: Light Bearer; Day Star. Lucifer came to be synonymous with Satan in Christian thinking, however, because of a questionable interpretation of the Latin translation from the Hebrew of a verse in Isaiah that says in the King James version, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

A later translation, more faithful to the Hebrew, reads: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!”

It may be that the Babylonians of the time, who held the Jewish people in captivity, worshipped what we know as Venus, the Day Star, in their pantheon of deities and that Isaiah was referring to this in the passage as a symbol of Babylon’s eventual downfall, but there is little to suggest that he was referring to a supernatural event that purportedly occurred before time began.

But because New Testament sources pictured Satan being cast out from heaven, and this passage in Isaiah offered a similar image, Lucifer, Light Bearer, Day Star, son of Dawn became the Devil.

However, if this strange dichotomy of Lucifer may owe itself to an imaginative if unsupported leap in Scriptural interpretation, our readings point out that Venus resists easy categorization in its other attributes, too.

She glows so brightly and lovely in the night sky that virtually every culture on Earth has called her after their goddess of beauty and love: Aphrodite, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Venus, Ben Bova reminds us. Sometimes she is the dazzling Evening Star, brighter than anything in the sky except the Sun and Moon. Sometimes she is the beckoning Morning Star, harbinger of the new day. Always she shines like a precious jewel (Bova, Ben; Venus, pg. 10).

Poul Anderson has his character in a story entitled “Sister Planet,” imagine that one could sit on Venus for a hundred years in one place, watching, and never see the same thing twice. And all that you saw would be beautiful.

Beautiful Venus…but as beautiful as it appears, the planet itself is the most hellish place in the solar system.

The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed spacecraft landers as if they were flimsy cardboard cartons. The sky is perpetually covered from pole to pole with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and sulfurous gases…(Bova, Ben; Venus, pg. 12). The Planet of Love UUCSEA 02/08/09 Richards / 2 of 4

Because of the proximity of Venus to Earth, many had hoped that this “Sister Planet” would share some of the traits of Earth, most importantly in welcoming life…but it turns out that it is not exactly hospitable, at least to life as we know it. So close…and yet so far, which should lead us to reflect, of course, on the unique qualities of this planet that allow this particular web of life to flourish. There may well be no escape hatch to the cosmos…

But my speculations took off in another direction, too. I found it interesting, and appropriate, that a planet named for the Goddess of Love and Beauty in so many cultures, should turn out to be so forbidding and dangerous. It speaks to me of the underlying truth that love can (and does) inspire explosive passions, not easily controlled by the dictates of family, religion or society. The heat of emotion that surrounds love and beauty can be dangerous; we even use the phrase that we were “burned” by love. People in love can feel that they could sit forever gazing in one another’s eyes and see new and beautiful things every moment…and they can also, if one or the other does not return the love, feel that they are experiencing the agony that one might if one were dropped on the real planet Venus, burning in the heat hot enough to melt aluminum, crushed like flimsy cardboard, choking on the very air.

It strikes me that we don’t do love very well in religious settings; we don’t approach it very honestly. Part of that comes from trying to articulate the many and various forms that love can take…but in general, we try to make believe that love is all sweetness and light and skip quickly over the raw emotions it can inspire. We make believe that we can easily tame it, train it, put a leash on it and direct it where we want it to go. But love can be dangerous and untameable.

BBC News reported that some Hindu and Muslim groups in India and Pakistan are calling for a ban on Valentine’s Day celebrations, as they find Valentine’s Day promotes immorality and encourages lustful emotions. One Hindu group, Lord Ram’s Army, recently dragged women out of a local pub to teach them a lesson about what was proper behavior. (Apparently, assaulting young women is not considered immoral behavior by this group). One spokesman for the group said they would “definitely attack” people who they found celebrating Valentine’s Day, while it was reported at OneIndia that they may take a softer stance this time, simply whisking the offending couples off to an immediate marriage.

Didn’t realize that Valentine’s Day was so controversial, did you? And though this particular response by religious factions is abhorrent, there is the recognition that love and beauty are extremely powerful in an emotional, physical and spiritual sense. Powerful; dangerous; not easily tamed or trained or even contained.

And this brings up one of the things that I love about Greek and Roman mythology; it allows for all the messiness of real life. The gods and goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology are often pictured doing very questionable things, from a moral standpoint. Now, to me, the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam sometimes is involved in questionable activity, too, but in those religions, because God is the all- Good and all-Powerful and all-Loving, his actions must somehow be justified and accepted. If God turns Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, there must be a good reason…but in Greek and Roman mythology, one really doesn’t have to justify what these gods and goddesses do. Far from being exemplary models for our behavior, their exploits often supply powerful examples of what not to do. They are unapologetically passionate, and so provide an indication, writ large, of where ordinary human passions can lead. And, being gods and goddesses, their behavior also has a great influence on our existence as we lucky humans suffer the ramifications of those unchecked passions. The Planet of Love UUCSEA 02/08/09 Richards / 3 of 4

The myths, in a way, explain the way things are, but they have stayed relevant long after the time that they were believed. They are now literary rather than literal. Picasso said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” and I would place the great myths in that category. They speak to something within us that we know to be true…like the fact that love and beauty can be companions of danger and anguish.

And in speculating on those truths as regards our sister planet, Venus, I wonder how it takes shape for us here on planet Earth. As we affirm and promote works of love from this place, we must also understand that love can become possessive, bitter, dangerous in its passion, selfish in its single-mindedness. It is bewildering to reflect on the fact that many of the atrocities that happen in our world might, in the eyes of the perpetrators, have been inspired by love: love of a wife, a husband, a child, a parent, a family, a God, a country, a tribe, a leader, a teacher, an idea, a people, a purpose…I committed this act, they may say, from love, and we can all chime in that this is not love but it’s a matter of semantics. To those people, it felt like love. So if we are to talk about the power of love--and we do and we will talk about the power of love here—we have a responsibility to recognize the power of love in all of its various manifestations and to articulate what it is that we mean by the love that we are promoting. We shy away from clarifying what we mean because, on the one hand, everyone knows what love is, right? And on the other hand, we know that it is just way too hard to encapsulate in a single description. Thus, everyone hears what they want to hear, the definitions keep wandering off into dark and uncharted territories, people use love to justify unjustifiable acts, and the rest of us are left with our feeble objections, saying that “that’s not really love.”

But what is? And how, recognizing its wild and untameable nature, do we promote it in its most healthy and beneficial manifestations? We cannot find a perfect description, once and for all, but we must engage the process of clarifying and re-clarifying what we talk about when we talk about love. We cannot trap it for our own use, but we can make channels for it that will allow us to share it with the world. If we do not help to define it from a place of thoughtfulness and concern for one another, who will we trust to define love? If we do not join in helping to make channels so that the whole world can feel love in its most compassionate manifestations, who will we trust to direct it?

And what, after all, better defines our own lives than what and whom we love? What better describes us, each of us, than how and where we find, celebrate and share beauty?

BBC News reported back in 2001 that astronomers were able to pinpoint the exact time, place and date in which Vincent Van Gogh finished one of his very last paintings. “The White House at Night” shows, as you may have guessed by that title, a small, white house at twilight under a large yellow star.

Astronomers at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos calculated that the star is Venus, which was bright in the evening sky in June 1890. They started by tracing the house, which still stands in the town. Researchers Donald Olson and Russell Doescher say the canvas was painted from the bottom up during the course of an afternoon and early evening. "You can see it's about 7:00 pm from the sunlight on the house, but as the sun sets, Venus becomes bright and obvious," said Mr Doescher, who added that he was astonished by the accuracy of the star's position in the picture. The Planet of Love UUCSEA 02/08/09 Richards / 4 of 4

Professor Olsen added: "In the painting, the light is coming from right to left, with the front of the house lit up, the left side of the house in shadow and the women near the gate casting shadows to the left. "We stood in Van Gogh's spot and saw exactly this lighting effect on the house in the last hour before sunset." A computer program calculated that Venus was in the position shown in the painting at around 8:00pm on 16 June 1890… I found this news story to be a parable of sorts. Through Van Gogh’s careful, creative and accurate portrayal of the planet of love and beauty, the evening star, Venus itself, astronomers were able to describe where he was and what he was doing…extrapolating out just a bit, through his communication of his own relationship to love and beauty, we were able to know him in a new way. Though I may speak with bravest fire, and have the gifts to all inspire, and have not love, my words are vain, as sounding brass and hopeless gain.

Your experience, relationship to, and expression of love and beauty in your own life helps others to know something about you, to know where you are. Your ability to make channels for the streams of love that flow to and through you will define your relationship with all that is. It is the gift that you, each of you, offer to this world we share, so that not only Venus, but Earth, too, becomes a planet of love. Darwin Day Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 02/15/09

Sermon Happy Darwin Day! Happy Evolution Sunday!

And, as we celebrate, I thought it would be worth taking a few moments to look at what exactly it is that we are celebrating.

Just as we marked the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth this last Thursday, on February 12th, that very same date also marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.

Celebrate Abraham Lincoln?—yes, of course. Lincoln, we know, was President of the United States in the period during the Civil War. He managed to preserve the unity of these United States in spite of the brutal divisions that had arisen within the country; he helped to end slavery; he revived and renewed the powerful words and thoughts of the Declaration of Independence for a new age, and delivered his own powerful and prophetic words in speeches such as the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address.

And Charles Darwin?…well, he wrote a book. He wrote many books on science, but one book in particular, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, that revolutionized our understanding of how life came to be. Natural selection is the process in nature first described by Darwin in which creatures best adapted to their environments survive in greater numbers to pass along those adaptations and traits to their offspring.

Not only do we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this year, but we also celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of that book that started it all: On the Origin of Species.

Biologist E.O. Wilson calls it “the greatest scientific book of all time.” The theory of evolution which arose from this book came to be the groundwork for understanding the origin and progression of life on Earth, leading geneticist and biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky to write in a 1973 edition of “American Biology Teacher” that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

So that’s something to celebrate, right? Evolution Sunday! We celebrate the man, Charles Darwin, because of the great gift that he offered the world in the form of a wider, deeper, eminently vaster understanding of life itself: evolution.

However, before we put on our party hats, we should realize that the celebration is not universal. There are those who will not be attending the party, who indeed see evolution as a cause for anger and protest rather than celebration and Darwin as a vile blasphemer rather than a hero.

Creationist Henry Morris wrote, “Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, Nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice” (The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, pg. 75). Now that is an Darwin Day UUCSEA 02/15/09 Richards / 2 of 4 impressive list to drop at the feet of Darwin, but no matter how you feel about the mixture of individual items on it, you must know that, for Morris, these were all terrible things and, most importantly, anti- Christian things. He was one of the founders of what became known as “Creation Science”--though many would question its classification as science--which began with the premise that the Creation story in Genesis was literally true and then carefully highlighted selected information that would support that premise.

More recently, opponents of the teaching of evolution have organized around what is called “Intelligent Design” Theory, which has been touted by its followers as a strictly scientific alternative to the theory of evolution. Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."

Kenneth Millar, professor of biology at Brown University and an expert witness at the Dover, PA trial in which the case for teaching Intelligent Design was defeated, writes:

“If I had to give a prize for the best idea that anyone in the antievolution movement has ever had, I’d award it to whomever came up with the term ‘intelligent design.’ Over the years the old standbys of ‘creationism’ and ‘creation science’ have served their purposes, but they’ve always had the weakness of revealing their religious nature too directly…The word ‘design,’ in contrast, doesn’t sound religious and seems to take no position on the age of the earth, while the adjective ‘intelligent’ appeals directly to our notions of purpose and meaning in the world around us” (Only a Theory, pg. 11)

It is clear that, though we may be celebrating Darwin and his understanding of evolution, supplemented and supported over these 150 years with mountains of corroborating evidence and insightful additions, there are those who see it as a threat--to the very meaning of life, a threat to the perceived purpose of existence. Natural selection, they say, cannot really substitute for—is indeed, a refutation of--Divine Providence. The answers it provides for those all-important questions—Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?—the answers that evolution suggests for those questions are unsatisfactory to those seeking a more orderly and purposeful response. Unsatisfactory and thus deemed unacceptable.

And before we simply write these critics off as religious fanatics or science-phobic activists, we should note that even those who accept the theory of evolution have some problems celebrating what they see as its sobering ramifications.

John Updike says “we shrink from what [science] has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos…Our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginably smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know” (John Updike, From our Pages, “Picked-up Pieces,” The New Yorker, February 9, 2009, p. 64 )

So the question remains—taking all this into account--for those of us who are celebrating today, the questions returns to us: what exactly are we celebrating? The absence of God? The loss of purpose? Our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos? What do we celebrate on Darwin Day?

We celebrate the courageous search for truth; the acceptance of that truth; and the incorporation of that truth, as best we can, into our lives. Darwin Day UUCSEA 02/15/09 Richards / 3 of 4

Peter Boyd, Collections Manager at Shrewsbury museums (Shrewsbury is Darwin’s birthplace), suggests that Charles Darwin’s openness to new ideas could be at least partially traced to his Unitarian roots. Though he was christened in the Anglican church, his mother took him to a Unitarian church as a young child and the Unitarians, says Boyd, “were much freer thinkers.” Now Charles’ father did not have a high opinion of Unitarians. They were so “low-church,” he said, they were almost “no-church;” “a mere featherbed to catch a falling Christian.” But for we who seek to keep this tradition alive, it is heartening to think that this early Unitarian influence made a favorable impression on Charles and may have contributed in some small way to his later discoveries.

And for all that folks like Creationist Henry Morris may have wanted to paint Darwin as the Antichrist, we have to remember that Darwin grew up with the understanding that God created the Earth and everything in it; he studied to become a minister; he had no particular complaint against the church nor is there anything to indicate that he relished inciting controversy on theological matters. He was passionate about observing and recording the truth, but he was cautious and careful in communicating his findings and mindful of its possible effects on those around him.

He agonized over the ramifications of his work on the faith of his wife, Emma; he wrestled with the loss of his own faith as he mourned the loss of his young daughter; the details of his life point to a responsible, compassionate, thoughtful man. Though he did not share his wife’s faith, he respected it. Though he honored his own commitment to truth by publishing On the Origin of Species some thirty years after he first began articulating the ideas within it, he took no pleasure in the prospect of pulling the theological rug out from under those seeking spiritual comfort. We celebrate the theory of Evolution itself, in the way that it has shed light on the origin of all life and our own place within it…but there is also something about the man, Charles Darwin, that is worth remembering and celebrating:

Evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, and science historian, Stephen Jay Gould writes in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002, pg. 1342): I will grant…that if Charles Darwin had never been born, a well-prepared and waiting scientific world…would still have…won general acceptance for evolution in the mid 19th century…So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith as the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way. And something almost unspeakably holy…underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.

There is something almost unspeakably holy that underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know.

Slavery in this country would eventually have ended without Lincoln; the theory of evolution through natural selection would most assuredly have been discovered without Darwin; the earth itself and all of life upon it will continue to evolve according to its own laws whether we accept the truth of those Darwin Day UUCSEA 02/15/09 Richards / 4 of 4 processes or not; but there is something almost unspeakably holy that underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details. There is something almost unspeakably holy in recognizing that what has happened has happened in a particular way and through particular individuals who may inspire us with their examples.

“[T]he most important thing about studying evolution is…that the endeavor contains a profound optimism,” writes Olivia Judson. “It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment. Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way.”

There is something in the details…something about noticing…something about asking questions— Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?--and searching out the answers…something about understanding and accepting what is; not what we would like; not what we wish; not what we’ve been told; not what we fear, not what we think should be, but what is, in all of its previously unimaginable intricacy…

Though I am always pleased to find a Unitarian or Universalist connection with important people in history, I am less concerned with what Unitarianism may have meant to Darwin than what Darwin means to the Unitarian Universalism of today. He models the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” that we covenant to affirm and promote in our Principles. He has shown a brighter light than had ever been shown before on the “interdependent web of all life” that we pledge to respect. He is our faithful companion as we strive to understand ourselves and our earthly home. As a religious tradition that heeds the guidance of reason and the results of science, we have no choice but to follow Darwin on his search for truth, hoping for some small measure of the courage and compassion that he himself displayed in his work and his life. There is grandeur in this view of life, said Darwin, to imagine that from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved…There is grandeur here…and that’s worth celebrating.

Many thanks to Janet Browne for Darwin’s Origin of Species: Books that Changed the World for much of the biographical material included here. Purgatory Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 02/22/09

I have to say that, in beginning some research for this sermon, my vision of Purgatory was fuzzy at best…and has only cleared up a little.

Growing up, good Protestant Boy, I knew that Purgatory was a Catholic invention, an imaginary halfway house between Hell and Heaven with no Biblical basis, I was told. It was wishful thinking for a last chance in the afterlife after what is really the last chance in this life.

The word Purgatory comes from the same root as the word purge; to cleanse, to purify. Souls in Purgatory were, presumably, being purified on their way to Paradise, but, curiously, their ETA could be moved up, their waiting period in Purgatory could be shortened, by the prayers of loved ones or, more crassly during the Middle Ages, by the procurement of indulgences. (Indulgences are items offered by the Church which believers bought or otherwise earned to decrease the amount of time or the severity of punishments they or their loved ones would receive in Purgatory).

As my confidence in the tenets of my own childhood faith waned, I began to be more interested in how all religious speculation about the afterlife came to be. As my certainty about Hell and Heaven has faded, my curiosity about what all of these concepts, including Purgatory, can tell us about human nature has grown. I find that Purgatory arose from the recognition that “most Christians remain sinful in some measure right up to their death; they therefore need both punishment and purging” to fully purify themselves for entry into Paradise (Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright, pg. 165). I discover that such great minds and talents as Thomas Aquinas spent considerable time and effort describing Purgatory; I find out that the Italian poet, Dante, is chiefly responsible for what images of Purgatory we have, and that it supplies the middle volume of his Divine Comedy, in which he writes,

“Now I shall sing the second kingdom, there where the soul of man is cleansed, made worthy to ascend to heaven.”

I discover (long after having read the book) that the well-known writer, monk and activist Thomas Merton entitled his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain after the topography of Purgatory described by Dante (each of the mountain levels representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins which are being purged from the lives of these sinners).

Seven Deadly Sins (most serious to least serious, reversing Inferno): Pride Envy Wrath Sloth Avarice: immoderate desire for wealth (& Prodigality: extravagant wastefulness) Gluttony Lust

Purgatory UUCSEA 02/22/09 Richards / 2 of 4

(Interesting note: before you even get in the gate to Dante’s Purgatory, there’s an outer waiting room. Those who made God wait--who waited to convert until they were on their death-bed, for instance—are sent here to wait for 30 times the amount of years they made God wait. Stephen King, commenting on this “waiting room” aspect, reportedly said, “If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library.” I know that many of you would agree because I see you all at the library after church or during the week…

And one more interesting—hopefully interesting--aside about King’s statement: he seems to be assuming that souls can go from Purgatory to either heaven or hell, depending on their performance. As far as I can tell, souls in Purgatory are destined for heaven. The only question is how long it will take them to get there. Dante even has a St. Peter-like figure guarding the Gate of Purgatory, which makes me think of a movie theater …you have to show your ticket just to get into the lobby--Purgatory--but once inside you know that you’ll be able to see the movie--Heaven).

So the whole idea of Purgatory may make for classic literature, not to mention hours of idle speculation, but what is its religious or philosophical or moral content? How did it come to be a tenet of one of the most influential religions in the world? If we understand it as based on the belief that we can be purified through suffering…Does that resonate at all with our Unitarian Universalist tradition? Does it coincide with our own experience and understanding?

First, let me share a bit of our Universalist history that may bear on our discussion of Purgatory.

Universalism originally arose within the Christian tradition, rejecting the notion of eternal punishment for sinners. A loving God would not condemn his creatures to eternal damnation; no crime that mortals can commit would warrant such a punishment from a just Deity. In other words, there is no Hell.

The Universalists, however, though they all agreed that there was no eternal punishment after death, did not necessarily agree on what did happen after death. One faction believed that souls were welcomed into Paradise immediately as they left this mortal life; they became known as the Death and Glory Universalists. The other faction believed that, indeed, there could be a limited time of discipline, punishment, and instruction—and limited was a relative term, as some speculated that it could last as long as 50,000 years-- a limited time of discipline, punishment, and instruction that prepared and purified the soul for entrance into Paradise.

Sound familiar? This faction was known as the Restorationist Universalists, the Restorationists, though it strikes me that they could as easily have been called the Purgatorians…or something like that. They had rejected the notion of Hell, but they had embraced a version of Purgatory.

This was not only a way of reassuring folks that really bad people would at least suffer for awhile— though it served that function, too--it was also a way of underlining the importance of free will. It was a way of holding onto the value of human endeavor and moral improvement.

You see, Calvinists believed in a doctrine known as Unconditional Election. It meant that God had already decided who would go to heaven and who was destined for hell. Nothing humans could do would change that decision; it was pre-ordained.

Universalists—the Death and Glory Universalists—though miles apart from the Calvinists in many ways, similarly believed that our fate was pre-ordained: in this case, God had decided that everyone was Purgatory UUCSEA 02/22/09 Richards / 3 of 4 destined for Paradise. Again, nothing that humans could do would change that decision. A much happier fate, assuredly, but a fate that left little room or purpose for free will.

The Restorationist Universalists shared theology with the Unitarians in that they felt that our choices, our reason, our individual spiritual growth and learning should have some effect on our fate.

Purgatory, though I still find the whole concept puzzling and unsettling in its focus on purification through suffering, does leave room for free will in a way that many Christian doctrines don’t.

“You assign each cause only to the heavens, as though they drew all things along upon their necessary paths,” says Virgil to Dante in Purgatory. In other words, you ascribe everything to the will of God and nothing at all to the will of humans.

“If that were so, free choice would be denied you, and there would be no justice when one feels joy for doing good or misery for evil. Yes, the heavens give motion to your inclinations…but you still possess a light to winnow good from evil, and you have free will.” In other words, yes, God is still in his heaven, we do not control everything, but we do have the capability of knowing right from wrong and we have the freedom to act upon that knowledge and our choices matter.

A primary focus of Dante in Purgatory is to highlight the consequences and potential of the choices that we make. In his picture of Hell, known as The Inferno, the suffering served only as punishment for the unfortunate souls who found themselves there. In Purgatory, the suffering is meant to have a beneficial effect; to teach, to purify, to open a deeper understanding. It unlocks a hidden potential to be better than we had been before.

Do we learn from our suffering? Here, in this life? Keep in mind that I am not inviting you to suffer because it’s sooo good for you. That is not my intention. But I am saying that there is some amount of suffering that is unavoidable that arises from the very fact that we are mortal. Sing of living, sing of dying, they are part of an eternal process like the ever circling sun which we cannot change, nor can we fully experience them without also experiencing the suffering which comes with it all. There is a certain amount of suffering that occurs in proportion to the extent that we are in love with life itself. “To live in this world, you must be able to do three things,” writes poet Mary Oliver, “to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing that your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” (#696, Singing the Living Tradition). There is pain sewn into the very fabric of existence; there is pain that comes from holding that which we cherish in the full knowledge that our grip will one day be released; there is suffering that comes because we don’t love one another well enough and because we sometimes love what is not worthy and sometimes fail to love that which is most worthy, and even because we love one another too well.

I believe that part of the “wisdom of the aged, deepened by a longer view” comes from the experiences of facing suffering that we maybe wouldn’t have believed we could weather. It is the courage, even though one has experienced great pain, to trust life again. If suffering can be said to have purifying powers, it is maybe because it can wash away our unworthy priorities. What is really important, we ask ourselves. Where should I focus my time, my energy, my attention, my self?

Does that mean we seek out suffering? Does that mean that we should refrain from easing someone’s suffering for fear that we will take away their opportunity to be purified? Does that mean we accept Purgatory UUCSEA 02/22/09 Richards / 4 of 4 wars and poverty and sickness and environmental devastation and personal tragedy and oppression and human cruelty and economic injustice as wonderful opportunities for personal growth?

Nothing that I have said should be heard as a justification for suffering. Nothing that I have said explains suffering; I do not promote it as the ultimate self-help tool; I do not embrace it; I do not like it. The very idea that we would resist an opportunity to ease another’s pain because of the spiritual value of suffering only highlights how religious doctrine can be used to subvert the central message of a religion.

There is more than enough suffering in this life to go around. There is suffering that is inextricably intertwined with life itself. We don’t need to worry that we will run out of suffering. We don’t need to save a space for it. In fact, one of the great gifts of suffering is the renewed commitment to ease suffering wherever and whenever we encounter it. It opens us to a deeper loving; opens us to the gift of care, both in receiving it and in offering it to others. It inspires us to search out a higher justice than is sometimes meted out in the natural course of events, and it compels us to help others in despair. One of the great gifts of suffering is that, having faced up to pain, we can allow our compassion to overcome our fear in striving to relieve the pain of others. Pray that we never let our beliefs about suffering interfere with our ability to relieve it.

A rather disheartening final note about doctrine: I mentioned earlier the sale of indulgences in the Medieval Catholic Church. This was one of Martin Luther’s major criticisms of the Catholic Church and became a major issue leading to the Protestant Reformation. Even Dante, good Catholic, consigned those who sold indulgences to the eighth circle of hell. The church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567.

The New York Times reported on February 10th that Pope Benedict has stepped up the distribution, reintroduced by Pope John Paul II in 2000, of indulgences for a new generation. In all fairness, they are no longer sold (though donations are generously accepted), but are earned through certain prayers, devotions, or pilgrimages in special years, and their purpose is still to reduce or erase the punishment that one receives in Purgatory. I’m not sure where the purification is in that scenario. What’s the point of a Purgatory with loopholes? Can even Divine Justice be bought off?

Or maybe we should pull our heads out of the clouds and take a look around at ground level. Maybe we should heed the words of Henry David Thoreau who, when asked on his deathbed if he could see into the next world, replied, “One world at a time.” If we wish to face up to suffering, if we wish to talk about justice, if we are working toward a purification of our souls, there’s plenty of work to do right here…and there’s no time like the present. In fact, there’s no time but the present…

Closing Words (Dante, the final words from Purgatory) From those most holy waters I came away remade, as are new plants renewed with new-sprung leaves, pure and prepared to rise up to the stars. 40 Days & 40 Nights Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 03/01/09

Reading “The Temptation of Jesus,” from the Gospel of Luke (4:1-13, NRSV)

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.

The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” ’

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,

“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” ’

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,

“He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, and

“On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” ’

Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Sermon How many of you noticed the smudge on Vice President Joe Biden’s forehead as he went about the business of government last Wednesday; that smudge was from the ashes that are placed on the foreheads of those who, like Biden, attend Roman Catholic Mass on Ash Wednesday. The ashes, a public recognition of the repentant heart of a sinner, is traditionally left on for the day and washed off after sundown.

Though I am certainly familiar with the practice--and though I should have been even more alert to the day as I was preparing for this service, for goodness’ sake--it took me a minute to realize what that was 40 Days & 40 Nights UUCSEA 03/01/09 Richards / 2 of 5 on the Vice President’s forehead. (That moment of ignorance paid off in that it got me to clean the dust off the television screen.)

But I’ll bet that I’m not the only one who was briefly puzzled; I’ll bet a few other folks cleaned their TV screens prior to the news commentators chiming in with helpful context or moved their eyes a little closer to the newspaper or computer screen before reading the caption under the news photo. And let’s face it: the whole celebration of Lent--which begins with Ash Wednesday—the whole celebration of Lent can be a little puzzling.

First of all, it’s one of those moving targets on the calendar. Lent—as I mentioned--begins with Ash Wednesday and culminates with the celebration of Easter, and we can only decide on which date Ash Wednesday will fall based on when Easter is, and we find out when Easter is by…do you know? Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Once we know when Easter is, we count back 46 days to Ash Wednesday. “46? Isn’t this sermon called 40 Days & 40 Nights?” Yes, the count of 40 days excludes Sundays…I don’t know why. The Eastern Orthodox Church counts this a little differently, with a different starting point (Clean Monday) and includes Sundays, but I’m not going to go into that right now. Suffice to say that there are many levels of intricacy to explore on your calendar if you’re interested.

Another puzzling thing about Lent is that, though it is celebrated, it is not celebrated in what this culture has come to imagine is the usual way. Namely: there are no presents. Ok, yes, in spiritual or philosophical terms people do speak of what they receive from their observance of Lent, but in the most practical terms, it is dissimilar to many other holidays in that it doesn’t focus on what we get or give; it doesn’t require an exchange. Christmas, Birthdays, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Hanukkah, all of these have a gift-giving expectation of some type, even if it’s only a card. On Easter, that trusty bunny is bound to bring some chocolate eggs for all those baskets, and Thanksgiving, though not gift-driven, sets up the expectation of a meal to end all meals (at least until next year). “For these gifts which we are about to receive, we give thanks…” These other holidays, to a greater or lesser degree, come with built- in marketing strategies because they operate, at least in part, on the concept of humans as consumers; they have expectations of stuff attached to them. It would be difficult—and you can tell how difficult because it hasn’t been done yet—to commercialize and commodify Lent. Why? Simple…it can be summed up in two questions:

What are you getting for Christmas?

What are you giving up for Lent?

Lent is not about getting more stuff; it is about choosing stuff you can do without. Outside of McDonalds having Friday sales on fish sandwiches (because some Catholics have traditionally given up the eating of other meats on Fridays during Lent), I have not seen a marketing strategy that can capitalize on that.

But if we are beginning to get a very general picture of how some people celebrate Lent, it is also important to try and figure out what is being celebrated, and why. How did giving something up become a part of the observance of Lent?

Lent is often portrayed as simply a preamble to Good Friday (commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus) and Easter Sunday (commemorating the resurrection of Jesus). It is like the prequel to The Passion of 40 Days & 40 Nights UUCSEA 03/01/09 Richards / 3 of 5 the Christ. One would expect, then, that it is mainly focused on the portion of Jesus’ ministry that comes just before his arrest, but that is not the case. The forty days and forty night of Lent come from an event that is said to have occurred before Jesus even began his ministry, the story that you heard Virginia read from the Gospel of Luke. This story also appears in the Gospel of Matthew, with the temptations in a different order, and it takes up a mere two verses in the Gospel of Mark (1:12-13):

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Jesus has just been baptized by John the Baptist. Maybe he is wondering about where his life will go next. Maybe he is questioning his purpose in this life. Maybe he just needs to get away, to be alone with himself and the God that he believes in. So he spends forty days in the wilderness fasting.

Understand, I’m not treating this as an historical event. Those who look for historical accuracy will be questioning how, if Jesus was alone in the wilderness and wrote no account of what happened that we know of, how the Gospel writers, who scholars believe came along considerably later, would be able to accurately recount what happened. It is not meant to be history, but rather revelation. It could be that some kernel of the story existed from early on in the oral tradition and that this was expanded over time to communicate a growing understanding of Jesus and his message. It employs symbols and references to other stories that would have been well-known. Forty—like seven; like twelve--holds symbolic significance for the Gospel writers: Moses and the Israelites spent forty years wandering through the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land; Moses spent forty days on Mt. Sinai in the presence of God.

I approach it as a religious story, a myth if you will, that may tell us something about who we are and how life is. And from that standpoint, I find this an interesting story to celebrate.

The famous poet, John Milton, who wrote the towering poem Paradise Lost regarding the story of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, also wrote a poem entitled Paradise Regained. Now I expected that this poem would be about the Resurrection of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament, the assurance of Paradise Regained to believing Christians, but it deals with another event in Jesus’ life entirely: you guessed it, the very same story as the one commemorated during Lent--Jesus’ temptation by Satan during his forty-day fast in the wilderness.

Now, in a way this makes sense. Paradise Lost was about Satan successfully tempting Eve to disobey God’s commands and Paradise Regained is about Satan’s failure to tempt Jesus. Jesus rescues Paradise for humanity.

But I find it interesting in another way, a Unitarian way, one might say. Milton was sometimes accused of being a Unitarian, a disciple of Michael Servetus, because of his rejection of the Trinity and his focus on the humanity of Jesus. The poem, Paradise Regained, is a prime example. Though the story has its fantastical elements, of course, Jesus does not employ any miracles here in the struggle against temptation. Biographer Anna Beer writes of Milton’s depiction of the temptation that, “to make the contest more real, the Son [Jesus] is fully human. He undergoes his temptations as a man, without any divine powers, experiencing hunger and cold, unaware at first even that the temptations are going to happen” (Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot, pg. 367) In other words, this is a person, not unlike us: vulnerable to the elements, as well as to the doubt and uncertainty that comes with this existence.

40 Days & 40 Nights UUCSEA 03/01/09 Richards / 4 of 5

And I wonder if that doesn’t allow us to enter the story in a different way.

Ok, fasting for forty days is a little hard for some of us to get a grip on, but fasting plays an important part in many religious traditions. It may be employed as proof that one is willing to sacrifice creature comforts to worship God. As self-discipline. As a symbol of repentance, self-imposed punishment for sin. As a reminder that one can rise above one’s animal nature. But it may also be a way to simply re- focus oneself on what is important. It may also be a way to see—or see again—the wonder of what is. It may be a way open our ears to that still, small voice. It may be a way to notice the stillness within, even amidst the hectic activity of every day. It may reacquaint us with the essence that has sustained us but that we have neglected for so long. Though it is common, especially in Western religion, to hear talk of “filling” our spirits, there is something to be said for “emptiness” in religious terms.

Giving something up, in the popular Lenten vernacular, may be a way to reacquaint oneself with the profundity, beauty, or simple enjoyment of everyday activities. By willingly giving something up, we may open ourselves to a deeper appreciation of it when it returns to our lives. Or, depending on what it is, we may find we can do without it, that we are better or stronger in its absence. By shaking up our normal routine, by being willing to question some of our well-established habits, by resisting temptations to take the easy, unreflective way, we may discover something about ourselves, something about life that we did not know before, that we would not have known if we hadn’t created an empty space for that realization to appear.

What are you giving up for Lent? There’s 36 days left (not counting Sundays)….

What are you giving up for Lent?

As a bratty kid, I used to answer this question with things like, “Lima beans…yes, don’t try and talk me out of it, I will do without lima beans for the full 40 days.” Or “Homework…I’ll give up homework. Or making my bed; much as I love it, I will give it up for Lent.”

But think about it. What are you giving up for Lent? What are you giving up?

We can’t help but notice the particular relevance of this question for our own place and time. An organization called Tearfund invites people to go on a carbon fast for Lent, beginning new routines that will help to reduce their carbon footprint and carry over into their everyday lives when Lent is over. Climate change; a free-falling economy; dwindling natural resources; “what are you giving up?” is no longer a question for otherworldly spiritual seekers, it is now inspired by practical necessity and it is increasingly recognized as a moral imperative.

Before I close, I will point out that not all Christians celebrate Lent. Catholics do. Lutherans do (I know from my own childhood). But the Rev. Brian Carpenter for instance, a Presbyterian Church in America pastor, has some rather strong objections. He points out that John Calvin called Lent a "superstitious observance,” and says there is no biblical foundation for it.

"The fact that Jesus fasted for 40 days from all food is not a commandment for us to have some sort of halfway fast for 40 days. Jesus walked on water, too. That doesn't imply that we should all be commanded to splash around in some lake at a prescribed time of the year."

Objection duly noted. 40 Days & 40 Nights UUCSEA 03/01/09 Richards / 5 of 5

I also fully understand that not all those who celebrate Lent would endorse my particular take on it.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should re-interpret or appropriate Lent for Unitarian Universalism. It has a particular history and context within the liturgical year of many Christian congregations that deserves recognition and preservation. I am not saying that we can make Lent ours.

I am saying that we can join in solidarity with the spirit of Lent and harness the power of willing sacrifice, of letting go, of choosing not to. We may find that our ethical obligation to the interdependent web of all life, as well as our individual spiritual growth, is served not only by that which we compassionately give, but also by that which we wisely give up. Religion by the Numbers: 1 Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 03/08/09

Readings 1. From an essay entitled “Monotheism and its Discontents,”(1992) by novelist Gore Vidal, an outspoken critic of monotheistic religions:

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved --Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal --God is the omnipotent father-- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.

2. From “Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet,”(1992, pgs 13-14) by religious historian, Karen Armstrong, who dubs herself “a freelance monotheist” :

The Judaeo-Christian tradition does not have the monopoly on either monotheism or concern for justice, decency, compassion and respect for humanity. Indeed, the Muslim interpretation of the monotheistic faith has its own special genius and has important things to teach us…In 1984 I had to make a television programme about Sufism, the mysticism of Islam, and was particularly impressed by the Sufi appreciation of other religions—a quality I had certainly not encountered in Christianity! This challenged everything I had taken for granted about ‘Islam’ and I wanted to learn more…In all the great religions, seers and prophets have conceived strikingly similar visions of a transcendent and ultimate reality. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience has been a fact of life. Indeed, Buddhists deny that there is anything supernatural about it: it is a state of mind that is natural to humanity. The monotheistic faiths, however, call this transcendence ‘God’. I believe that Muhammad had such an experience and made a distinctive and valuable contribution to the spiritual experience of humanity. If we are to do justice to our Muslim neighbors, we must appreciate this essential fact…

Sermon There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet.

This is one translation of the Shahada, the first of the Five Pillars of Islam, the cornerstone of Muslim belief and practice. The public recitation of this statement ushers new converts into Islam.

There is no God but God.

Sounds a little strange to our ears. If one believes in God, then certainly the God one believes in would be God and there wouldn’t be any God but God, right?

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Sometimes we hear it as “There is no God but Allah,” which suggests that the God who is affirmed here is a particular deity of Islam, but Allah is simply an Arabic word for God, and Muhammad—whose birthday is celebrated tomorrow—Muhammad was very clear that this was the same God as the one that spoke to Christians and Jews, those whom he called The People of the Book (the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament). Allah was generally understood by Arabs to be that same God that Jews and Christians worshipped even before Muhammad came along…so how is it that Muhammad changed things so drastically? If Allah was already recognized, how is it that Islam begins with Muhammad?

There are probably quite a few reasons, but here are a couple of the most prominent:

First, some 1400 years ago in 610 C.E., Muhammad received a revelation from God, through the angel Gabriel, to and for the Arabs. No longer did they have to translate the workings and wonders of this God from the culture and language of others; this message was revealed to one of their own, spoken by one of their own and was meant for them. Indeed, it is said that the recitation of the Q’uran in Arabic holds a power for those who know the language that is untranslatable. It is not only the meaning of the words, but the very sound of the words.

Second, Muhammad was told in no uncertain terms that Allah was the only God. There is no God but God; there is no God but Allah.

This was new. Arabs had recognized Allah before, but in the context of a number of tribal deities, as a member of a divine family. In that context, “there is no God but God” carries a radical challenge. Muhammad was saying, in effect, “Contrary to what we have believed for centuries, there are not many deities competing for our allegiance and attention, there is only Allah to whom we are called to surrender our lives utterly and completely.” (Islam means surrender). “This is the same God that spoke through Abraham and through Moses and through Jesus and now through me. God is not many; God is One. There is no God but God.”

So what makes this call to monotheism important?

First, we need to put it in context. One, it has been said by that wonderful group of musicians Three Dog Night, is the loneliest number, but it is also, from a certain perspective, the holiest number. One and one-ness are features of probably every faith tradition, not to mention many scientific and secular schools of thought. Whether we are searching for the One True God or the Theory of Everything, we are fascinated with finding the source of life, where all the many and varied streams of existence originate, because that will help to tell us something about the nature of the world as a whole and help us to understand ourselves more clearly.

In that sense, the move from polytheism (many Gods) to monotheism (one God) has sometimes been seen as part of a natural progression or evolution, if you will; of a widening understanding of the inter- relatedness of all.

The Hebrew people, who are often credited with being the earliest monotheists, did not begin that way. The Ten Commandments, you will remember, say, “You shall have no other gods before me,” with the implication that there are many other gods that you could choose from, and I’m telling you, for your own good, you’d better stick with me. It is thought that, for many centuries, the Hebrews practiced something known as henotheism, which is the worship of one God (or a particular pantheon of Gods), Religion by the Numbers: 1 UUCSEA 03/08/09 Richards / 3 of 5 even though there is the recognition that other gods exist. In other words, my god is better than your god (or at least that’s what I’m banking on).

There was also the concept that gods were tied to particular locales and groups of people. “Where does your god live?” was not an inappropriate or naïve question; gods lived in certain lands or temples or nations, thus it was common to adopt the gods of the place where you found yourself living. Maybe you had traveled to a new land in search of a better life; maybe you had been forcibly moved to a new place, defeated in battle and/or enslaved. Regardless of the reason, the rule for which god to worship seemed to be: love the one you’re with. This was especially logical in that, if one had been defeated in battle, one’s god had been defeated, too. Wouldn’t it make sense to switch allegiance to the stronger god; the victorious deity?

Interestingly enough, scholarly speculation has it that it was amidst the agony of the Babylonian exile, when the Jewish people had been soundly defeated and many were taken captive, ripped from their homeland, that Judaism developed into a full-blown monotheistic religion. When it looked like, indeed, their God had been defeated, they found that the spirit of Yahweh remained with them, even in exile. Remembering their covenant to have no other gods before God, they dared to imagine that their were no other gods to have, in reality. They suddenly saw that the divine plan was deeper and wider than they had ever guessed. They dared to claim that their God was not only their God, but was the creator of all life; the God not only of the Hebrew people, but of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Egyptians. We are not all servants of different gods, fated to brutalize one another forever in a competition for power, but we are all children of one God if we would but see. Why, then, do we persist in spreading violence and brutality and injustice? How can we justify the savage treatment of some of God’s children, that are as worthy and as loved by that God as we are?

Monotheism held the potential for a new kind of ethic and Muhammad saw that his people were desperately in need of understanding that they were all one family. The Arab peoples were experiencing the rise of a merchant class; cities were blossoming; trade was increasing. The old tribal identities were fast giving way to new individual identities fueled by the power and opportunity that money could bring. The old tribal ethic, of taking care of and sacrificing for one another within the clan underlined by the precarious nature of daily existence, gave way to a simple and familiar bottom line that all too often comes with greater comfort and security: me first.

Muhammad spoke directly to the injustice that he saw growing unchecked. He spoke to challenge what he saw as the worship of money. He said, in effect; do not kid yourselves that because you have left your tribe for the city that you are no longer responsible for one another. The truth is that we are all one tribe under one God and our only proper posture is not the swaggering arrogance of affluence but the humble submission to the one true reality that underlies all that is. In reclaiming what he saw as the pure roots of monotheism from the confusing twist of abstract theological arguments that had plagued Christianity, he sought also to revive the ethical responsibility that submission to the one true God would necessarily entail, the one described so beautifully by the Hebrew prophet, Micah, when he described what God required as doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. To worship God is nothing other than to serve the people.

Amazing potential there. Call it the Power of One…and we should be somewhat conversant with the power of one, as we are Unitarian Universalists after all. Uni—one.

Religion by the Numbers: 1 UUCSEA 03/08/09 Richards / 4 of 5

Unitarians, historically, stood for the unity of God over against the attempts to dilute or fracture that all- embracing concept. Famous Unitarian Frances David proudly proclaimed Egy Az Isten (God is One) in 1568 Transylvania (SLT 566).

Universalism proclaimed the all-embracing love of the one God over against the attempts by some to decide who was worthy and who was not. Famous Universalist Hosea Ballou said, “Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace” (SLT 705).

And the words of our ancestors have echoed down through the ages, finding expression in the words of our present President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Bill Sinkford, who described his own view of Unitarian Universalism as “One God, no one left behind.”

But that’s not the whole story, is it? We can feel the potential, the partial reality of monotheism; but we have also experienced its pitfalls. I included both Karen Armstrong, who associates monotheism with “justice, decency, compassion and respect for humanity,” and Gore Vidal, who sees monotheism as “the great unmentionable evil,” because I think that we need to hear and acknowledge the truth expressed by both of them.

Monotheism seems to have the potential to bind us together in unity, but it has all too often driven us ever further from one another as each religion, and even each sect within a single religion, lays claim to the one true faith about the one true God. In other words, yes we are all God’s children…but he always liked me best. My God is your God, too, so if you disagree with me about who this God is or how this God acts or what this God requires, you must be wrong.

Further, the postulation of a single all-powerful, all-loving God creates unavoidable questions when we are faced with the horrible brutality and suffering that is experienced by all too many people. For lack of satisfactory answers, some people are left justifying the unjustifiable and proposing to speak for God: the perceived sins of gays and feminists brought on the attack of 9/11; God used Hitler to secure a homeland for the Jews; Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on abortion, or gay rights, or the war in Iraq. These are admittedly extreme examples from a handful of popular personalities that certainly don’t speak for monotheism in general, but the tension of the question persists and cannot be ignored, especially on behalf of those who are suffering. How could a loving God, who could change things, who could intervene, choose not to? How can we, in the name of God, choose not to?

We can each name off a string of atrocities during our lifetimes that never should have been allowed to happen, and those are only the ones that receive some kind of global attention. Those who are suffering cannot wait for justifications of God’s actions. We cannot expect them to be comforted by offhand assurances of God’s love. They need the mobilizations of human efforts, regardless of religious orientation, to work for rescue, relief and restoration.

We here today do not all believe in one God. Someone described modern Unitarian Universalists as believing in “one God, at most.” We do have theists with a variety of perspectives, and we have agnostics and atheists and humanists and those who practice non-theistic religions, and we have a whole variety of ways of describing our various spiritual and ethical orientations. That is as it should be. “One God, no one left behind,” is a welcome perspective on this tradition that we share, but it is only one perspective in the mix. Bill Sinkford hastened to add in that same article that this was only his present Religion by the Numbers: 1 UUCSEA 03/08/09 Richards / 5 of 5 definition of Unitarian Universalism, and he urged each one of us to “[p]ut a name to what calls you, and to what you find yourself called to do in response.”

Put a name to what calls you and to what you are called to do. See, what we need are not just definitions but working definitions of our faith, whatever it may be; definitions that inspire and enable us to engage the important work of justice and equity and compassion across the world. Religions need to reclaim the vital calls to compassionate action from which they first grew and set aside the bitter divisions that add to and inflame the misery of the world.

And what we need is a concept of one-ness that does not rely on our thinking alike or acting alike; a one-ness that is not enforced with the sword or manipulated by the threat of terror in this life or the next. We need to cultivate a one-ness that binds us together in common purpose, healing the world of its savagery and greed and violence, lifting hearts and opening minds. Many windows, one light…many waters, one sea.

Diversity of perspective and opinion and practice need not be a hindrance to unity. The Q’uran reads, “We have called you into tribes and nations so that you can know one another.” Imagine, all of the different cultures and traditions and beliefs and insights, all allowing us to know and understand one another, pulling us outside of ourselves, offering new perspectives that change us and further strengthen us for the work that we share.

Then we may fully appreciate the gifts that each tradition brings to the world. Then we may, indeed, experience the unity of spirit in the bonds of peace. Then we may truly come together as one. Promise-Keepers Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 04/05/09

We gather around a promise. That’s what you hear every week in our welcome. It’s written at the top of the order of service. We are a covenantal congregation. We come together not around a single set of beliefs but around a promise we have made…We gather around a promise.

So far, no one has jumped up during those words and said, “Wait a minute; I didn’t make any promise.” And I think that is because, not only are you all extremely well-mannered, but you understand and you are living out that promise. You know that I didn’t pick these words out of thin air. I didn’t make this stuff up. It is simply a restatement of things you’ll find elsewhere among us.

What you’ll find, for example, in the Covenant of the Congregation:

As we journey together, searching for truth, working for justice and strengthening the web of life, we covenant to honor and care for each other.

It is there in our Mission, where we pledge to create and sustain a welcoming community of caring people where all receive emotional support, intellectual stimulation, and respect for their individual spiritual paths.

And when we say in our Mission that we will promote the principles of Unitarian Universalism, then we are saying also that we covenant—we promise to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth; justice, equity, and compassion in human relations…

If I say that we gather around a promise, it is because the promise is everywhere we look; it is there in the words that we choose; it is there in the work that we carry out together; it is there at the heart of this congregation; it burns within the flame of our chalice; it is there in the shining history, courageous deeds and compassionate acts of our liberal religious tradition.

We gather around a promise.

But is that all we have? Is it enough?

A promise can sound a little weak. We sometimes pull out a promise when we face the skepticism or doubt of others.

You don’t believe I’ll do it? I will do it! I promise! Scout’s honor. Swear to God. Cross my heart and hope to kiss a crippled cricket, as my mother says.

And we often speak promises in the face of our own uncertainty.

In the midst of the oncoming storm we tell our children “Everything will be okay, I promise.” Promise Keepers UUCSEA 04/05/09 Richards / 2 of 5

Everything will be okay…will it? We don’t know. We promise what we can’t technically guarantee, except to say that we are making a deeper promise to ourselves that, whatever happens, we will do our best to make it okay; that we will stand strong and protect those we love to the best of our abilities.

We promise in the face of a future reality that we cannot predict.

Will you love…comfort…honor…keep…in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, so long as you both shall live? Will you? Do you? Have you?

The truth is that relationships that we thought would last a lifetime, that we promised to sustain for a lifetime, sometimes end, and that even in our ongoing relationships we fail all too often at fulfilling the promises that we have pledged to one another.

All in all, promises, though well-intentioned, heartfelt, sincere, can feel like pretty flimsy hooks to hang our hopes on, let alone the hopes of our entire congregation, our living tradition.

When I am talking to couples who want to get married, I often ask this question:

“What happens when a promise is broken?”

There is often an uncomfortable silence. There may be meaningful looks between the couple, as if to say, “How did we ever pick this guy to do our ceremony?” Sometimes there are anxious looks between the couple or toward me, as if the individuals are trying to figure out if I know something that they don’t.

Granted, it is something of a pessimistic question posed to two people who are usually completely submerged in optimism; the dissonance is palpable. And I don’t ask it because I am waiting for the right answer…I have no right answer in mind. But for people who are making promises, I think it is an important question to hold onto.

A promise, to be meaningful, must hold within it the potential of being broken. A promise that deserves its name must challenge us to go beyond what we can achieve effortlessly. A promise that cannot fail is not a promise; it’s a foregone conclusion that doesn’t require our commitment to sustain it. And the promises that we are talking about carry on into the future, so that even if they are fulfilled today they may well be broken tomorrow, and if they are broken today…well, what then?

This is why some may scoff at a religious community that professes to gather not around a single set of beliefs but around a promise.

“A promise…really?” these imaginary critics might say. “I mean, your promise is nice and all that— treat each other with respect and compassion—we do that too, but we have the additional stability of our Scripture, of our God, of a common creed which unites us in its expression of our beliefs. You can’t build a religious community on a promise.”

And I daresay that, though we love what we have found here, we sometimes feel vulnerable to those criticisms. Promise Keepers UUCSEA 04/05/09 Richards / 3 of 5

“So, do you believe in Jesus?” they ask.

“Well, ummm, some of us do,” we stammer.

“Do you read the Bible?”

“Well, yeah…and lots of other books and myths and…”

“Well what exactly is it you believe?”

“Uh, well, it depends on who you talk to…we believe…well, each person has their own beliefs…so people with differing beliefs can come…”

“So you don’t have any beliefs?!?!”

And by this time you may be wondering why you’re a Unitarian Universalist. What are we, anyway?

We are a covenantal congregation. We do not come together around a single set of beliefs, but we gather around the promise we have made…

We need not be shy or embarrassed about our lack of common creed. We celebrate it! If I was to change anything about that welcoming statement today, it would be where we say:

The promise that sustains this community can hold a myriad of different beliefs and values and experiences…

No: the promise that sustains this community thrives because of the myriad of different beliefs and values and experiences that we hold. That is part of what nourishes and sustains our promise. We don’t resist fashioning a common creed because it’s too hard or because we don’t want to offend someone; we resist fashioning a common creed because a creed can subvert the promise that sustains this community. Beliefs, common beliefs that are considered exclusively sacred, can subvert the promise.

How many of you have heard of The Promise Keepers? I’m talking about that particular Christian movement, beginning in 1990 that sought, in their own words, to “to ignite and unite men to become passionate followers of Jesus Christ through the effective communication of seven promises that are listed in all of their materials. Promise keepers.

Sports stadiums filled with Christian men listening to speakers who railed against the societal pressures that seemed to mock their religious convictions and erode their family commitments at every turn; these men were challenged to reclaim their integrity by recommitting themselves to the promises they had made to their faith, their marriages, their children, their “fellow men,” their churches, and the world.

While I had many problems with the movement, not least of all their exclusion of the wide spectrum of family values that I believe deserves our respect and recognition (with hearty congratulations to Iowa!) and their sports-fan type of exclusivist theology (We’re number 1!), I couldn’t help but admire the attempt to meet the real-life challenge of the promises that we make.

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This movement peaked right around the time that I was attending seminary. In 1997, an estimated one million men gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for “Stand in the Gap,” marking arguably the largest gathering of Christian men in modern U.S. history. In 1999, I was studying a story in the book of Ezra in my Hebrew Scriptures class that provided a rather ironic parallel story. (Remember, underlying this movement is a strong commitment to what the adherents consider the Word of God (the Bible), as well as to the commitments that they have made to their wives and families.)

Ezra is speaking to a large crowd of Israelites after the Persians had allowed them to return from their exile and to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. This is a huge crowd of people all coming to recommit themselves to their religious identity, to reclaim their integrity as the people of God, and as I read it I couldn’t help but picture something like a Promise Keepers meeting, with one important difference.

Let’s remember: the Promise Keepers are urging men to recommit themselves to God and to their wives and families.

Ezra was urging men to recommit themselves to God and, because some of the Jewish men had married foreigners, to immediately abandon their foreign wives and families.

Yes, that’s right. In order to reclaim their proper identity as God’s people and to cleanse themselves of foreign influences, they were urged to immediately abandon their wives and families. I thought of this as the great Promise-Breakers meeting.

And the deeper point for me, and the ironic context of hearing so much about the Promise Keepers at the time, is that they placed themselves firmly on the biblical foundation for family values…But obviously, Biblically speaking, there was at least as much support for promise-breaking as promise-keeping.

And if it were only this story we could chalk it up to my sometimes warped perspective, but this is only a small example of the story we’ve seen played out throughout history when religious beliefs, considered exclusively correct and unassailable, subvert the promise of compassion and understanding at the heart of the religion. At least, it reduces the active compassion for people outside the group. At worst, it results in horrible acts of violence and devastation. In every case, it breaks the promise.

And so it is that we do not come together around a single set of beliefs, but we gather around the promise we have made…and because the promise is all about coming together across the boundaries of different beliefs and experiences, coming together across perceived divisions, we do not simply accept diversity, we do not simply hold diversity, we are sustained by that diversity, we are a new thing under the religious sun and we are proud of that. We gather around a promise to treat each other with respect and compassion and we take that respect and compassion out into the world. We gather around a promise to listen to one another and encourage one another and we take our ability to listen, understand and encourage out into the world. We gather around a promise that is big enough to hold all of us and far-reaching enough to challenge us every day, and we fulfill that promise in exciting ways and we inevitably fail to fulfill that promise in other ways…

We don’t always treat one another with respect and compassion. We don’t always seek out and nurture our own best selves. (Sometimes, I am sorry to admit, I seek out and nurture my petty self; my lesser self.) We don’t always encourage one another…We fail to rise to the promise.

Well, you won’t be excommunicated for being crabby and thoughtless. I wish that we could Promise Keepers UUCSEA 04/05/09 Richards / 5 of 5 excommunicate my petty self, but it’s just part of the package; it comes along with my best self.

But it does beg the question I spoke of earlier:

What happens when a promise is broken?

We can simply give up on promises. Too easily broken. They don’t work. They’re not strong enough.

Or we can recommit ourselves to the promise. If it was meaningful yesterday, it is not made less meaningful by our imperfect expression of it. It is not the promise that suffers when we break it, after all, but ourselves as we experience the disappointment in our own efforts. But there is nothing that says, having learned something about ourselves, forgiving ourselves and one another, we cannot return to the promise with a greater wisdom, a deeper humility, and a renewed commitment.. The strength of a promise is not necessarily in its perfect fulfillment, but in our willingness to let it shape us even as we imperfectly seek to meet its challenge. It pulls us outside of ourselves; causes us to stretch beyond our own beliefs; inspires us to reach farther than we thought we could…It is neither weak nor flimsy; it is made strong with our trust and our hope and our compassionate effort.

So it is that we gather, each and every week, around a promise. Resurrecting Religions Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 04/12/09

Readings 1. From Resurrection (1899) by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude: Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the air was balmy; everywhere, where it did not get scraped away, the grass revived and sprang up between the paving-stones as well as on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards. The birches, the poplars, and the wild cherry unfolded their gummy and fragrant leaves, the limes were expanding their opening buds; crows, sparrows, and pigeons, filled with the joy of spring, were getting their nests ready; the flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sunshine. All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. It was not this spring morning men thought sacred and worthy of consideration not the beauty of God`s world, given for a joy to all creatures, this beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony, and to love, but only their own devices for enslaving one another. 2. From Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (2008) by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker: We can come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth… We reenter this world as sacred space when we love life fiercely and, in the name of love, protect the goodness of earth’s intricate web of life in all its manifold forms. We feast in paradise when we open our hearts to lamentation, to amplitudes of grief for all that has been lost and cannot be repaired… Paradise provides deep reservoirs for resistance and joy. It calls us to embrace life’s aching tragedies and persistent beauties, to labor for justice and peace, to honor one another’s dignity, and to root our lives in the soil of this good and difficult earth.

Sermon Today is Easter Sunday.

But allow me to travel for a moment from Easter Sunday back to Good Friday…Good Friday, which always confused me as a kid. Crucifixion. Horrible, violent death. The seeming victory of the bad guys. This is good? And yes, I was told that Good Friday was probably a variant on an earlier phrase God’s Friday, but that didn’t really help much. It hardly seemed like God’s finest moment, with his son crying out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And then I was told that this Friday was good because of what Jesus’ death meant for sinners and most especially because it pointed toward the victory over death on Easter Sunday, the hope that arose from seemingly-utter despair.

Resurrecting Religions UUCSEA 04/12/09 Richards / 2 of 5

And let me say that, for me, the story of Easter that Christians celebrate each year can indeed hold hope. And let me tell you why I think that the traditional notions of Good Friday--the ones that I am familiar with--why I feel that they have the potential to distort that hope. Because, woven throughout the whole tragic, violent story of the death of Jesus, this story that makes one want to cry out against the inhuman brutality, there is the equally powerful Christian interpretation of it that says, “It had to happen this way.” It had to happen this way.

As a child, I felt the underlying conflict that this caused.

I wanted to enter the story, as children do, and I wanted to convince Judas to reconsider his actions. Give back the silver coins, alert Jesus to the plot against him, continue as friends… I wanted to somehow stop the soldiers from mistreating Jesus….but at the same time I couldn’t really want to convince Judas or stop the soldiers because…it had to happen this way.

I wanted to enter the story, as children do, and I wanted to urge Pilate to listen to his wife’s dream, to heed his own intuition. I wanted to somehow plan Jesus’ escape….but at the same time I couldn’t really want Pilate to let him go or Jesus to escape because…it had to happen this way.

I wanted, simply, to stop the violence…but at the same time I couldn’t really want to stop the violence…

I am not suggesting that Christian theology of the cross is meant to support violence. I am suggesting that pairing violence with inevitability, with fulfillment of prophecy, can inspire a dangerous resignation to violence at least and can be used to justify violence at worst. It supplies a subtle and deadly endorsement of violence to fulfill a purpose.

Whenever news of wars or violent conflicts throughout the world came up in conversation among my extended family someone would inevitably refer to a Bible verse, always the same verse, and because of the frequency of these types of conflicts it may be the single most-quoted Bible verse in my experience:

“There will be wars and rumors of wars…”

There will be wars and rumors of wars. The context for the story comes from the gospel of Matthew: Jesus is asked by his disciples what signs will precede his second coming and the end of the age. He says, “…you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet” (Matt. 24:6).

There will be wars…this must take place. But do you see how this operates within a conversation? Did you read about the awful thing that happened, the number of people killed, the lives devastated? “Well, you know what it says, there will be wars and rumors of wars…” “It’s like the Bible says…” “It’s just like Jesus said…”

And listen, these were not heartless people…they most decidedly were very compassionate people. They did care. But the waging of war in lands across the oceans, even and especially when instigated by our own government, gives us a feeling of powerlessness. And the Bible is used here to provide a way to transform that unsettling feeling of powerlessness into a satisfying feeling of recognizing the fulfillment of prophecy. And rather than staying with our initial resistance to war and sympathy for its victims, feelings that leave us restless and dissatisfied with our options, we can move into an acceptance of war as inevitable, indeed even a welcoming of violence as the necessary step toward the second Resurrecting Religions UUCSEA 04/12/09 Richards / 3 of 5 coming of Jesus, just as Good Friday was a necessary step toward the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. Suddenly, it is not only explained but sanctioned by religion.

And I realize that this is theology that may not be relevant for many of you. It seems like a particular discussion about a particular interpretation of Christianity. So why does it matter?

For me, it matters because I believe—my Universalist self passionately believes--that we need religions, all religions and philosophies and ethical traditions, now more than ever, to speak clearly, compassionately, and courageously to oppose violence and oppression and the unjust distribution of resources. I am using a story from Christianity because it is the religion that I am most familiar with through my own experience, and I am using it because it is Easter today, and I am using it because it is the tradition that gave us the powerful story of the Good Samaritan and I am using it because, given our roots in the Christian tradition, there is much that we can legitimately challenge and also much, like the story of the Good Samaritan, that we can draw from…

Easter, at least in part, is about certainty overturned; finding hope precisely where we believed there was no hope. And one of the messages of hope that Easter brings to me that often gets lost is the powerful example of resistance to state-sanctioned violence and religious oppression. Though they had experienced the brutal execution of their teacher, this understandably-frightened group of disciples and followers experienced something else that allowed them to not only come back together, but to bravely spread the teachings they had been given even in the face of oppression and fear. They had already seen what could--and likely would--happen to them in the execution of Jesus, but, without much reasonable hope of succeeding, they chose to resist and persist nevertheless. That was their response to terror; to violence.

What is our response to violence? What is the religious response to violence across the world today? Why is it so muted? Religions, ideally and inherently from their own teachings, should nurture the courage to resist violence rather than supply the excuses to enact it. They should help to give their adherents the resources to face it squarely and to move compassionately toward healing its victims and to work for preemptive peace, not war.

The Good Samaritan story, both the one in the Gospels and the revised version we enjoyed today, is at least partly about our response to violence, to the victims of violence. What does the Samaritan/the homeless man do? How does he respond? He moves quickly to ease the pain of the one who’s been hurt, ensure his safety and comfort. That is a natural human reponse that must be nurtured and affirmed by religions against the temptations to distance ourselves from one another.

I understand the tendencies to assume; to explain; to justify; to walk by…Religion should challenge those tendencies, not sanctify them. We shouldn’t use Jesus’ words about the poor always being with us as if that provided some moral smokescreen for the obscene gap between the richest and the poorest in our nation and the world. We have to help one another, practice helping one another, and religion should provide the gateway to a greater openness. If it only provides assumed certainty about the way things are and have to be it can never strengthen us to explore the possibility of what could be. If it, too, is locked in the system of division and oppression and self-interest…what then?

And keep in mind though I have used the Christian story, this resignation toward violence finds its way into many religious and ethical traditions, sciences and philosophies under various guises. It can appear in the Buddhist’s acceptance of all that is; it can appear in the Jewish claim to the Promised Land; it can Resurrecting Religions UUCSEA 04/12/09 Richards / 4 of 5 appear in the Muslim call to jihad; the Hindu call to duty; it can appear in our attitudes toward politics and history (you know, those people have been fighting for thousands of years, that’s just the way they are); it can appear in the Darwinian clothing of evolutionary realities regarding the human species (people have been fighting one another for millions of years, that’s just the way we are); it can appear in the postmodern anthropological language of cultural relativity (who are we to judge?) Wherever and whenever it appears, it must be challenged.

And what resources can we Unitarian Universalists bring to challenge it? How might we connect with the hope of Easter, this ancient Springtime celebration?

I’ve mentioned this cartoon that William Schulz, past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former director of Amnesty International, referred to in a Berry Street Address:

[T]he wayside pulpits of an Episcopal church and a Unitarian Universalist church were both visible on a street corner. It was Easter, and the title of the Episcopal rector's Easter sermon was "The Truth and Power of the Risen Christ" while across the street the Unitarian Universalist [minister] was preaching a sermon entitled "Upsy-Daisy."

I used that to gently poke fun at the Unitarian Universalist tendency to substitute a rather frail celebration of Spring for the powerful message of Easter. But here, as so many times before, I feel that I was mistaken, that I underestimated the importance of our deep and abiding respect for the interdependent web of all life and the power of noticing what is.

Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Resurrection, is a novel about seeking redemption. During the course of the book, the main character discovers a vast underside to the society in which he has managed up to this point to feel so comfortable and oblivious, and realizes that he must take some share of responsibility for the way that this society has inflicted misery and desperation on so many people. But what Tolstoy starts out with is a description of Spring coming--regardless of the many ways that humans had devised to keep it from coming--and he plants here (so to speak), early on in the book, a recognition of the devastating effects on the grown-ups who choose not to notice the Springtime, who conectrated rather on “their own devices for enslaving one another,” who fail to share in the gladness that the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children share.

For us, as for Tolstoy, the strength to challenge oppression, to oppose violence, to restore the outcast, to expand our compassion comes, not from some far-off promise of Paradise, but from the Paradise that exists all around us if we but notice. We can come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth…We seek to restore beauty because we have seen it; we seek to spread peace because we have experienced it; we offer comfort because we have felt comforted.

The resurrection that matters is not the one that was or the one that will be but the one that is possible right now; the one that bears fruit in our actions as well as our minds and spirits; the one that frees us from the tomb of resignation and apathy. The hope that it offers, that all religions and philosophies and ethical traditions must offer, is a challenge to look deeper into ourselves; to reach farther than we thought we could to help another; to stand stronger than we would have believed possible to oppose violence and injustice.

Resurrecting Religions UUCSEA 04/12/09 Richards / 5 of 5

A Gnostic text from the second century called Treatise on Resurrection says this:

The resurrection is different. It is real, it stands firm. It is a revelation of what is, a transformation of things, a transition into newness… This brings goodness.

It is beauty we celebrate. It is hope that we nurture. It is goodness we seek. The Great Transformation Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 04/26/09

Story for All Ages – “The Birth of Confucius” from a story by Sophia L. Fahs

Readings 1. From The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (1998) by Thich Nhat Hanh pgs. 111-112, 250: (Explanatory Note: Vulture Peak in India is traditionally recognized as the site where Buddha first delivered some of his most important teachings). If you were to hear on the radio that the Buddha is going to reappear on [the Vulture Peak] and the public is invited to join him for walking meditation, all the seats on all the airplanes to India would be booked, and you might feel frustrated, because you want to go, also… Look deeply at your intention. Do you want to fly halfway around the world so that later you can say you were with the Buddha? Many people want to do just that…They are not able to be in the here and the now. They only want to say, “I was there, and this is me standing beside the Buddha.” But it is not true. They were not there. And that is not the Buddha… Vulture Peak is beautiful, and Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America are also beautiful. When there is mist on the mountains, it is beautiful, and when there is no mist, it is also beautiful. All four seasons are beautiful. You are beautiful and your friends are beautiful. There is nothing to stop you from being in touch with life in the present moment. The question is, Do you have eyes that can see the sunset, feet that can touch the earth? If the Buddha were to transmit his eyes to you, would you know how to use them? Don’t think that happiness will be possible only when conditions around you become perfect. Happiness lies in your own heart. You only need to practice mindful breathing for a few seconds and you’ll be happy right away. Confucius said, “What greater joy can there be than putting into practice what you have learned?” 2. From The Great Transformation (2006) by Karen Armstrong, pgs. 287-288: One day a Brahmin found the Buddha sitting under a tree and the sight of his serenity, stillness, and self- discipline filled the priest with awe. The Buddha reminded him of a tusker elephant: there was the same sense of enormous strength and massive potential brought under control and channeled into an extraordinary peace. The Brahmin had never see a man like that before. “Are you a God, sir?” he asked. “An angel…or a spirit?” “No,” the Buddha replied. “Remember me as one who is awake.” Sermon Buddha’s birthday…and yet our story is about the birth of Confucius?

Well, actually today is not the Buddha’s birthday…I mean we don’t think it’s the Buddha’s actual birthday today. Historically speaking, we just don’t know.

Japan celebrates the Buddha’s birthday with a “flower festival” called Hanamatsuri on April 8th. Many Southeast Asians and Tibetans celebrate Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death all together on a day The Great Transformation UUCSEA 04/26/09 Richards / 2 of 5 that occurs for us in May or June, while the South Korean Buddha birthday party lasts for a week, usually ending in May. Looking at all those dates, I figured today was as good a day as any to celebrate Buddha’s birthday here in our community.

Many of you with good memories may be understandably puzzled as we recognized another Buddhist celebration back in December and at that service the Theater for All Ages actually re-enacted the birth of Buddha in spectacular fashion. On that day, however, we were commemorating, not the birth of the Buddha, but the traditional celebration known to some Buddhists as “Bodhi Day,” referring to the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha sat when he attained enlightenment.

Recalling that long-ago service as I prepared for this service, I am embarrassed to say that I thought: “Geez, I just talked about the Buddha…what else can I say about him?”

Isn’t that sad? And I don’t mean just sad sad, I mean SADD…Spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder.

I mean, sure, Buddhism has been around for thousands of years, has well over a billion adherents, countless people have devoted their lives to the study and practice…but two Sundays in a year? Please!

But I took some consolation in imagining the Buddha asking a similar question: Why are you talking about me again? To what end? What is your point? Is it important that you recognize the right dates for these celebrations? Do you think if you read one more book about me that you will have something new to say? Do you imagine that I can give you the truth?

No, Reverend…tell them this: Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be your own confidence; hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp.

So there were a few reasons that I thought the birth of Confucius was an appropriate story for this Sunday.

The first is that Confucius and Buddha were both, along with Jeremiah and Socrates and Lao-Tse and others, part of the Axial Age, this period between the 9th and 3rd century BCE that saw the birth of some of the major religious and philosophical traditions that continue to inspire and influence humanity to the present day. This is the period that Karen Armstrong calls “the great transformation,” as these unique individuals in widely varying cultures all affirmed a compassionate response to the violence and upheaval that surrounded them.

The second reason that I thought it was appropriate to tell about the birth of Confucius in our celebration of the Buddha is that the Buddha was crystal-clear in his teachings about this: it was not about him. It was not about him. If you become fixated on the Buddha as a prophet or a god or a guru or a key to your enlightenment, you have missed what the Buddha taught. This led ninth century Zen Master, Lin-chi, to utter the famous teaching: “If you meet the Buddha on the road…kill him!”

(I once unwisely used that example in a children’s story. One father told me later that, upon returning home, his young son grabbed a stick and was running around outside, jabbing it forward and shouting, “Kill the Buddha! Kill the Buddha!” Which awakened me to the many unintended consequences of religious teachings…)

But the Buddha’s journey was less about “finding himself,” as we might say in Western parlance, as The Great Transformation UUCSEA 04/26/09 Richards / 3 of 5 about “losing himself;” extinguishing self; dying to self. What he found, what he taught could not be contained within any one doctrine or dogma or religion, was not the property of any one person or group of people, and was emphatically not about him but available to all.

So I think that the Buddha would be more than okay with sharing the spotlight today with Confucius.

And there’s one more reason that I found it appropriate to join the stories of Buddha and Confucius together, and this goes back to Armstrong’s book and has to do with transformation. Transformation. What does that word mean to you?

This is from the Merriam Webster online dictionary:

1 a: to change in composition or structure b: to change the outward form or appearance of c: to change in character or condition

Given that, let me step back a bit. I am fond of quoting the Rev. Robert Latham, a Unitarian Universalist minister, when he says that basically every religious community has the same mission: the transformation of individuals and society.

As we talked about that in the class on the great transformation, some folks pointed out that transformation, as a goal, really doesn’t stand on its own. Transforming from what? To what? To change in composition or structure; change the outward form or appearance; change in character or condition…The one constant in the definitions of transformation is change, but for our purposes, if transformation is what we’re after, we must have a destination, or at least a direction. Changing to what?

To put it in a single phrase: ever-greater compassion. Transformation of individuals and society toward greater compassion. That’s a pretty good mission, isn’t it? To nurture a deeper understanding of and active compassion toward all living things.

But how, then, do we go about this mission?

This is where the people that Armstrong discusses in The Great Transformation are so helpful.

Because part of what I described earlier—what will I say about the Buddha this time?—part of that is because we have a pretty good idea of what the Buddha is going to say to us. We know pretty much what Confucius is going to say to us. We know pretty much what many of the great teachers throughout human history are going to say to us. That Golden Rule just keeps popping up in each and every tradition…but it can’t be that simple, can it?

Kurt Vonnegut has a wonderful passage in his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in which a character who is not at all religious is invited to baptize newborn twins. He sprinkles them with water and says these words:

Hello, Babies! Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. The Great Transformation UUCSEA 04/26/09 Richards / 4 of 5

There’s only one rule that I know of, Babies: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIND.

There’s only one rule that I know of…and part of me insists that there must be more, more, more. I look forward to exploring previously unexplored philosophies; I devour various interpretations of the great teachers; I want more information, greater knowledge, wider wisdom, because somewhere, out there, somewhere there is the answer. I think, as Unitarian Universalists, our self-identification as seekers, as searchers, and the general attitude toward the value of education and the acquisition of knowledge, sometimes feeds into this notion that somewhere out there an answer is waiting for us, if we just keep seeking, exploring, learning.

But, in this matter of compassion, I already have the answer. I already have a mission. I already know what I should do.

“Why should we look to Confucius or the Buddha for help?” Armstrong asks in her introduction. “Surely a study of this period can only be an exercise in spiritual archaeology, when what we need is to create a more innovative faith that reflects the reality of our own world. Yet, in fact, we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age” (pg. xii).

Though religion these days is often considered to be a matter of adopting the right beliefs, Armstrong says that the Axial reformers were not concerned with beliefs. “What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level…the only way you could encounter what they called “God,” “Nirvana,” “Brahman,” or the “Way” was to live a compassionate life” (pgs. xiii-xiv).

There’s only one rule…and we already know it. It already rests within us.

“Hold to the truth within yourselves,” said the Buddha. The Hebrew Prophet Jeremiah reports God as saying, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” The trick, the key, the mission is to act in accordance with what we already know. Doing things that change us at a profound level.

You have got to be kind.

And that doesn’t require the explanation of deep philosophical maxims. It doesn’t require the unveiling of hidden truths about a transcendent realm. It doesn’t require a trip to Vulture Peak or Mecca or General Assembly. It doesn’t require another book or another dvd or another sermon or another moment of seeking. It just takes practice.

Confucius said, “What greater joy can there be than putting into practice what you have learned?”

It’s just that simple, say these Axial Age reformers; just that simple…and just that difficult.

See, for me, part of the reason that I keep looking for answers outside myself is because I am not that comfortable with the concept of practice. I want to be able to play the guitar now. I want to be able to speak Spanish now. I want to plug the chip in my head that gives me the knowledge. And in just such a way, I want to have that transcendent experience that provides the irrepressible inspiration to do the right thing; that sweeps me like a tide toward unselfishness and compassion. I want to be able to do The Great Transformation UUCSEA 04/26/09 Richards / 5 of 5 it…but I don’t want to practice.

And partly I see that as a failing of liberal religion. In rejecting what we see as hypocritical constructs of organized religion, we have sometimes rejected the value of doing anything that we don’t feel; that we aren’t inspired to do; acting from duty or discipline without that emotional and/or spiritual engagement is seen as hypocritical or insincere. We look back to Confucius, for example, and say, “What’s with all the rules? What’s with all this empty ritual?” We want to do what is right because we are filled with a passion for the good; we want to love our neighbor because our hearts are overflowing with affection for all creatures.

How’s that working for ya?

We operate under the assumption that transformation always comes from the inside out. We need to understand it, to feel it, to believe it, and then we will do it. But what the Great Transformation prophets and teachers and reformers and thinkers knew is that transformation can begin on the outside, in what we do, and work its way in to change who we are.

I’ve been waiting almost 50 years for the inspiration that will allow me to play the guitar like a real musician, but I still can’t play. I have the desire to play, but unless I practice; unless I engage the work; do it even when I don’t feel like it; playing the guitar will continue to elude me.

Loving our neighbors is like that. We may want to, in theory. We may wait for the overpowering feeling of affection to wash over us…and we may still be waiting. And if and when it comes, it doesn’t stay, does it?

Compassion--love for all living things--cannot wait for nor rely on emotional epiphanies or spiritual breakthroughs. It takes work. It takes practice. “Compassion is not just a feeling,” writes Karen Armstrong, “It must constantly be translated intelligently into practical, concrete action.”

The Great Transformation that Armstrong describes has somewhat arbitrary dates, which she acknowledges. I prefer to think of what was begun way back then as an ongoing project in which we are intimately involved. It will take practice and practice means concerted effort (even when we don’t feel like it), frustration, disappointment…But it also means growing confidence and greater ability and opportunity to inspire and support others in their practice.

“As far as the Axial sages were concerned,” she writes, “respect for the sacred rights of all beings—not orthodox belief—was religion. If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world.”

What is the great transformation that we seek? We seek, always, to be kind…and to save the world. It’s as simple as that. Mother Nature Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 05/10/09

It is traditional on Mother’s Day to sing the praises of mothers everywhere, to celebrate the joys and honor the challenges of motherhood, and to pay tribute to individual mothers as representatives in this sacred role. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that…

Except that it is all too easy to extrapolate from a handful of individual experiences to the whole; to suggest that particular family scenarios are universal; to offer shining examples against which our own lives are measured…and often found wanting. In other words, it is all too easy to romanticize and idealize motherhood and mothers even though this only serves to distance us—inextricably caught up in our real lives--from the very thing that we seek to embrace.

Also, the tendency to romanticize motherhood does an extreme disservice to mothers. It puts a soft, fuzzy focus on just how hard it is to be a parent and, in particular, a mother. And if we carry an idealized notion of mothers, how many can really measure up? Any? And if they don’t measure up to that vision we carry, aren’t they to blame? The cultural backlash is evidenced in the cliché version of a visit to a therapist. “Tell me,” looking over a pair of glasses, “about your relationship with your mother.” Ever since Freud, we’ve come to assume that that’s where the problems lie. That’s where all my trouble began, right? If my mother had done this or been that or not done this or not been that…

Further, when we celebrate the powerfully inspiring, encouraging, and empowering influence that our mothers can have on our lives, we must also keep in mind the harsh reality of those who have suffered neglect, abandonment, and even abuse from their mothers. This is not to say that one can’t speak of one’s particular experience, be it positive or negative or placed somewhere in that wide open area in between, but only to keep in mind that not everyone shares in our experience and yet we have all found sources of encouragement and inspiration and nurture.

And with all of that said, I now want to move to the general, the universal, the archetypal mother. I know that I just said it’s dangerous to call on the universal, and I believe it is, especially when applied to individuals and particular circumstances…and yet we carry a concept, a vision of motherhood, that allows us, across many and varied circumstances, to use Mother as metaphor for Earth, for the Divine, for unconditional love. We attribute values to motherhood such that, even if we did not experience them from our own mothers, we are able to say of another person, “She was like a mother to me.” Mothers and motherhood are threaded throughout our art and literature, our religions, our understanding of the world and our places in it.

Maybe nowhere is that more evident than in the image of “Mother Nature.” So I’d like to take a little time to investigate “Mother Nature,” both in terms of a description for the natural world and in terms of which attributes of human nature we imagine are best exemplified in mother nature. What, in other words, is the nature of mothers that finds its way into our understanding of the world and our relationships with all of life.

To begin, I’d like to share with you a passage from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic who lived from (1342 – 1416). She writes: Mother Nature UUCSEA 05/10/09 Richards / 2 of 4

This fair lovely word Mother, it is so sweet and so close in Nature of itself…To the property of Motherhood belongs natural love, wisdom, and knowing; and it is good…Thus Jesus Christ that does good against evil is our Very Mother: we have our Being of Him—where the Ground of Motherhood begins—with all the sweet Keeping of Love that endlessly follows. As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother…

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother…

Whatever your beliefs about God, I would ask you to recognize that for a great number of Christians, this is a radical statement. So wedded is the Catholic Church hierarchy to the construction of God as exclusively male that last year Pope Benedict rejected a gender neutral alternative that baptized people “in the name of the Creator, and the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier.” “The invalid formula, the Vatican statement points out, arises from feminist ideology, and an attempt ‘to avoid using the words Father and Son, which are held to be chauvinistic.’” Too bad, says the Vatican. People baptized under this new formula need to be rebaptized.

So considering that this is such a risky theological area in which to dive, what are the attributes that caused Julian, a good Catholic, to risk the proclamation of God as not only Father of all, but Mother, too? “To the property of Motherhood belongs natural love, wisdom, and knowing; and it is good…we have our Being of Him—where the Ground of Motherhood begins—with all the sweet Keeping of Love that endlessly follows.”

We have our Being of Him…of Her. If we conceive of a God (so to speak) that gives us life, what more appropriate image than God as Mother?

It is understandable, following this train of thought and reflection, to move our focus of worship and reverence from, or at the very least to expand it beyond, Father God to Mother Nature. Are we not, after all, creatures of this planet, inextricably entwined with all other life, connected most intimately to our Mother Earth, indebted for our very lives to the substance of Mother Nature? But while it may be understandable that we follow this train of thought and reflection, while Pagan and Wiccan traditions have kept this focus alive for centuries, it is also undoubtedly heretical in some religious circles, as our ancestors the Transcendentalists quickly found out. And yet they, along with many others, made the leap and bid us to follow.

In a very general sense, and in a way that does not even necessarily touch us individually but does, I think, effect us culturally, we have grown used to feminine imagery for the Earth and the natural world, but because we have been thwarted from including this feminine imagery in our conceptions of what is divine, what is most sacred, what inspires our reverence, we have not found a way to truly honor that most intimate of connections: the giving and sustaining of life itself.

In much of Western religion, God, residing outside this earthly realm, promises us a home in the great beyond, too, so we decide that the Earth is not our home but, at best, a temporary residence; a comfortable apartment, but how much should we really put into taking care of it, you know? God, being separate from the natural world, suggests that we have “a life outside” too, which gives birth to phrases like: “We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” Even popular environmental constructs of “man vs. nature” unintentionally imply that we are separate from. I really appreciated the reminder in Mother Nature UUCSEA 05/10/09 Richards / 3 of 4

Tricia’s sermon about the inherent worth of earth that everything we see, everything around us, all that is comes from Mother Earth…and that includes our very bodies, our very beings.

Understand, I am not commenting on the relative truth of any given propositions, but I am interested in the often unintended ramifications of our theological, scientific, ethical, and philosophical propositions. How do they lead us to act and respond to one another and to the world which we inhabit? And what would it mean to truly honor our Mother Earth? On this Mothers Day, how would we respond if we truly integrated the knowledge that but for our mother, we would not be here.

And I do understand that Mother Nature, like all metaphors, has its problems. By anthropomorphizing nature itself, we imply that nature may show love and concern for individual creatures when, from the evidence, we would have to say that this Mother is no respecter of persons. And yet, maybe even because of that, there is an unconditional acceptance of all, an opportunity for each of us--whomever we are, whatever we have done or left undone, however we feel-- an opportunity for each of us to, as Wendell Berry puts it, “rest in the grace of the world” and be free (483).

And if our reconnection with the values we associate with motherhood allow us to renew and revitalize our relationship with the Earth, might they also allow us to envision a new relationship with one another? Julia Ward Howe thought so.

As we reconnect with the precious nature of life on this earth and the irreplaceable nature of each of its many expressions, how can we continue to brutally, heartlessly, intentionally kill one another, whether we claim it is for freedom or liberation or safety? Julia Ward Howe made this connection explicit and called on women, on mothers, to give voice to it:

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace...

In her memoirs, remembering the inspiration for this proclamation, Howe wrote:

The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world...I had desired to institute a festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines.

Mother Nature UUCSEA 05/10/09 Richards / 4 of 4

It should be noted that Julia Ward Howe’s proclamation of 1870 did not provide the Mothers Day celebration we recognize each year. The traditional Mother’s Day celebration that we know was started by Anna Jarvis of West Virginia, who created a memorial to her own mother in 1907 and then pushed for a national holiday which was instituted in 1914. It should also be noted that by the 1920’s, this same Anna Jarvis felt that the holiday had become so commercialized, empty, and frivolous that she actively campaigned against it, going so far as to be arrested at one point for disturbing the peace.

Sad to say, we, as a culture, have continued along this path of trivialization. We have not stayed true to either Julia Ward Howe or Anna Jarvis in their visions of Mother’s Day. Though strides have been made, we have not confronted nor admitted the sexism that persists in our society; we have romanticized motherhood and condescended to mothers; we reward those who are gentle and mild and frown on those, like Anna Jarvis, who disturb the peace and attack those, like Julia Ward Howe, like Cindy Sheehan, who disturb the war, who speak their minds clearly and ask uncomfortable questions from the firm Ground of Motherhood. We claim to be the pinnacle of evolution, yet treat our Mother Earth as if we were the most vain, self-centered, and thoughtless of adolescents.

We could reclaim this holiday in the spirit of Julia Ward Howe. There is a possibility, after all, that we can mature into healthy adults if we would but listen to our mother.

A man once consulted the Prophet Muhammad about taking part in a military campaign. The Prophet asked the man if his mother was still living. When told that she was alive, the Prophet said: "(Then) stay with her, for Paradise is at her feet." (Al-Tirmidhi)

I read that and thought to myself, would that each person’s mother would live forever. If that is what it takes to keep us from war, may we keep the spirit of the mother alive, that spirit that says:

Our sons and daughters shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the people of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons and daughters to be trained to injure theirs.

Now that would be something to celebrate! Planet of War Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 05/24/09

Opening Words – (#583 Archibald MacLeish, Responsive Reading) The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses; who has not heard them? They have a silence that speaks for them at night, and when the clock counts. They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us. They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done. They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave. They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them. They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this. They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

Readings 1. From “The Disease of Permanent War” (May 18, 2009), by Chris Hedges: The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism…ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes in many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war. 2. “Iron,” by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967): Guns, Long, steel guns, Pointed from the war ships In the name of the war god. Straight, shining, polished guns, Clambered over with jackies in white blouses, Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth, Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses, Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.

Shovels, Broad, iron shovels, Scooping out oblong vaults, Loosening turf and leveling sod.

I ask you Planet of War UUCSEA 05/24/09 Richards / 2 of 5

To witness-- The shovel is brother to the gun. Sermon The War of the Worlds is a novel by H.G. Wells written in 1898 about Martians landing in a small village in England and their nearly successful attempt to destroy human civilization and take over the Earth. It has come to be known as one of the great works of science fiction, an early classic that set the tone for many “alien invasion” stories that followed.

On October 30, 1938, CBS’s Mercury Theatre on the Air presented a radio drama based on this novel as their Halloween episode. The setting was changed to Grovers Mill, New Jersey and a good share of the story was broadcast as a series of news bulletins reporting, first, astronomers’ observations of strange explosions on Mars, then the landing of a cylindrical meteorite in Grovers Mill, and finally the desperate, panicked reporting of the creatures that came from within the meteorite and the death and destruction that they caused as they incinerated onlookers with heat rays.

It all sounds kind of quaint from this vantage point; science fiction of the “bug-eyed monster” vintage. But the radio broadcast is remembered for the panic that ensued when some listeners, tuning in after the show had already begun, took the “news-bulletin” format to be real.

Partly, this can be attributed to the fact that the Mercury Theatre was broadcast without commercial interruption, to enhance its dramatic effect…which apparently worked well in this case. Outside of the introduction and the end of the show, there was only one disclaimer, 40 minutes through, affirming the fictional nature of what was being heard.

Also, the episode was directed and narrated by one Orson Welles, who brought his considerable dramatic abilities to bear on making it realistic (and soon became quite famous amidst the hysteria surrounding this broadcast).

The town of Concrete, Washington experienced a power failure just at the time that the radio drama reported that the Martians were spreading throughout the country, invading towns and attacking citizens with flashes of light and poisonous gases. Needless to say, this resulted in some panicked reactions, from fainting to frantic escape.

As it turned out, the cause of the power failure was a short-circuit at the Superior Portland Cement Co.

But while we can smile at the panic, the general theme of this story continues to play out in our cultural life, our cultural mythology. And though Mars was possibly chosen as the source of such an invasion because some of the scientific speculation that was going on around the apparent “canals” on its surface during the time of H.G. Wells, I wonder if another reason that Mars seemed a likely invader is because of the mythology behind Mars itself. Mars, after all, is the Roman god of war, based in part on the figure of Ares in Greek mythology. If we’re going to be invaded by aliens from another planet, Mars seems the likeliest mythological candidate. After all, Venus is closer…but picturing violent, tentacled monsters shooting death rays from the Planet of the Goddess of Love is maybe a little discordant.

Which makes me wonder, sometimes, how we ever named a planet for the God of War in the first place. And I found that, in the move from Ares in Greek mythology to Mars in Roman mythology, the god of war experienced something of a makeover. Planet of War UUCSEA 05/24/09 Richards / 3 of 5

The Greeks, generally speaking, experienced Ares as a troublemaker, to put it mildly. He was bloodthirsty and cruel. In Homer's The Iliad, Zeus, the leader of the gods, tells Ares, “You are to me the most hateful of the gods. . . . For dear to you always are strife and wars and battles."

For the Romans, however, Mars was honored as one of their most important deities, second only to Jupiter, who was borrowed from the Greek Zeus. Mars is much more dignified than Ares, and honored by the Romans as the father of Romulus who was said to have founded Rome itself. Though Mars began in Roman history and religion as a god of vegetation and fertility, he morphed into a god of war as Roman aggression and imperialistic ambitions grew. And this hateful Greek god of war, Ares, who was bloodthirsty and cruel, did not match their image of themselves…thus the makeover into honorable, upright, laudable god of war: Mars.

But what, I wonder, happened to Ares?

And I ask that question, not as some intellectual mythological diversion, but in terms of the heart- wrenching request of the young dead soldiers that MacLeish voiced in the Opening Words: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

How will we do that? How do we best honor their memory today?

Let me suggest to you that we are not doing a very good job of it, as a nation, as a world community. Honoring the memories of those dead soldiers; honoring the sacrifice of those who have survived the ravages of war and carry the wounds of battle would mean admitting the reality of the brutality and cruelty of Ares, the god of war.

Let me suggest to you that Mars has invaded our planet: the god of war with the makeover, the god of war that hides behind a grand and noble exterior; that demands our worship; that allies itself so closely with virtue and honor that it cannot be questioned. Mars has invaded: the god of war that depends ever and always on maintaining its noble appearance to satisfy its ravenous appetite for death and destruction. Mars has invaded: the god of war that is worried about pictures of brutality, rather than the brutality itself; the god of war that masquerades as necessity, as practicality, as peace, and so carries out its violent purpose unchallenged.

Mars has invaded. And if we look back to the residents of Concrete, Washington in 1938 and smile and shake our heads at the fact that they accepted something fictional as if it really happened, what then do we say about ourselves now, who routinely accept the most horrifying things really happening as if they were fiction. We listen to the radio, watch TV, read web sites and blogs and newspapers, and hear the reports of suffering and pain and war and destruction as if they were the latest installments of Mercury Theatre.

And the soldiers know better. The soldiers do not have the luxury of ignoring the reality. They cannot pretend it is Mars when Ares awaits them. Will we honor them by pledging to send more and more and more troops to more and more and more battles? Will we honor them by pledging perpetual war, by ensuring that the suffering they experienced will be experienced by generation after generation for as long as humanity survives? Will we honor them by continuing in the delusion that only war will keep us safe? (Did it keep the young, dead soldiers safe?) Will we honor their companions in battle who survived by putting bumperstickers on our cars but denying them psychological services, jobs, support Planet of War UUCSEA 05/24/09 Richards / 4 of 5 for re-entering a culture that worships Mars when they have experienced the torturous onslaught of Aries? If Memorial Day is about remembering, what is it that we will remember?

Bill Moyers, in a commentary on Memorial Day, said this:

Over some 40 years now it has seemed to me that as time goes by we tend to remember wars, and the suffering they bring, as if they were inevitable, natural acts of history, rather than politically inspired choices. But war, as was famously said, is politics by another means - the lethal legacy of failed leadership, enabled, even ennobled, by propaganda, the partisan opiate of politics. It is good to be reminded…that war is too important to forget, and that's one reason to observe Memorial Day. There is another - to hold before our face a mirror, so that we might see the images of war reflected in our own eyes.

Orson Welles, it is said, was inspired in his direction and narration of The War of the Worlds by two other radio plays written by poet, Archibald MacLeish, who wrote our Opening Words. Welles actually starred in one of these plays, Fall of the City, in 1937. In it, the people of a nameless city subjugate themselves to a statuesque, armor-clad tyrant. Only the announcer, played by Welles, sees that there is nothing under the armor; the people, prostate, don’t dare to look. “The people invent their oppressors,” says MacLeish. “They wish to believe in them.”

In MacLeish’s play, “Air Raid,” the announcer is stationed on a tenement roof and as he waits and fears for the enemy planes to come over, his microphone picks up the incongruous, commonplace sounds and voices of women chattering, of children playing. Tensely poised for the inevitable attack, the announcer fills in the waiting time by remarking:

We call it peace and kill the women and the children. Our women die in peace beneath the lintels of their doors. We've learned much; civilization has gentled us: We've learned to take the dying and the wounds without the wars. . . .

Let me suggest that war itself has become our oppressor. We need to look beneath its impressive armor to the emptiness it covers. Mars has invaded and taken hold of our minds such that we call war, peace; such that we move from debating just war to defending each and every war as just; such that we answer the young dead soldiers by saying we will give their noble sacrifice meaning by ensuring the deaths of more soldiers in meaningless war; such that we move from the war to end all wars to the war that never ends.

Chris Hedges, a long-time war reporter who wrote a book entitled War is a Force that Give us Meaning, describes this idea of permanent war as a type of invasion, saying it “is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy.”

And if--in a phrase that has been attributed to Greek playwright Aeschylus in the 5th Century BCE and Republican Senator, Hiram Johnson in 1918—if the first casualty of war is the truth, what does perpetual war suggest to you? Will we honor the memories of dead soldiers--will we honor the soldiers who survived through the battles, scarred with the brutal reality of war--with made-up stories? Will we admit to Ares or hide behind Mars?

Planet of War UUCSEA 05/24/09 Richards / 5 of 5

H.G. Wells wrote another, lesser-known novel about Martian invasion in 1937 entitled Star-Begotten. This time, the Martians were not so malevolent, but were engaged in a subtle plan to infiltrate and alter the human race genetically such that we would pursue a peaceful, fair, and free world. The main character comes to identify these “altered” beings not least of all because they challenge many accepted notions of the time that, once examined, are illogical, unjustifiable, destructive to humanity itself. He imagines that, once reaching critical mass, these altered individuals will work to create “a world gone sane.”

But at the end—and I apologize for this spoiler—at the end he realizes that, indeed, he is one of these altered individuals, he along with his wife and newborn son, and that he need not only watch from the sidelines the changes that he foresees, but that he can and will be part of the challenge of building a new world.

The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses; who has not heard them? They have a silence that speaks for them at night, and when the clock counts. They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us. They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done. They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave. They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them. They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

It is we who must say.

What will we say?

Closing Words (#578, Olympia Brown) We can never make the world safe by fighting. Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God; and must share the wealth of the world. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must ever teach this great lesson.

Religion by the Numbers: 3 Taking a Second Look at the Trinity Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 06/14/09

All of us gathered here today share a history with the number 3 as it relates to religious thought. The only reason that we are known as Unitarian Universalists is because our liberal religious ancestors parted ways with the mainstream Christian theology which viewed God as a Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God; one essence. Orthodox Christianity became Trinitarian; our liberal religious ancestors were branded as heretics for being Unitarian.

The idea of God as a Trinity evolved slowly out of a particular understanding of a handful of Scriptural passages. Nowhere in the Bible is Trinity explicitly mentioned, nor are phrases like one substance, which was later used to describe the union of Father-God, Son-Jesus, and Holy Spirit. (Three persons; one substance.) Because of the lack of Scriptural evidence for such a theological leap; and because of the tortuous logic of trying to imagine three separate and distinct persons without imagining three Gods; our liberal religious ancestors spoke heatedly against such a doctrine as damaging the integrity of the very religion it claimed to support.

William Ellery Channing, in the famous sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity” that Roland read from, says this:

We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost… and when common Christians hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings, different minds?

We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity.

It is a debate that seems quite distant from the lives of our congregations today. But lest we imagine that it was always and only quibbling over an arcane theological point, we should remember that in 325 CE at the Council of Nicea where these points were being debated, where the first articulations of a Trinity were being hammered out, it is reported that as our ancestor Arius rose to argue against this Trinitarian doctrine, he was punched in the nose by Nicholas, Bishop of Myra…

Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who came to be known as St. Nicholas…

Yep, that’s right: St. Nicholas. Our proud history includes a man who was actually assaulted by Santa Claus. You have to be one heck of a heretic to do that, right?

And though we can smile at that fleeting if unfair consequence of opposing Trinitarian doctrine, the other consequences of heresy were not nearly so humorous. As Christianity assumed its role as the religion of the state and embraced its institutional incarnation, the consequences for Arian and Unitarian Religion by the Numbers: 3 Taking a Second Look at the Trinity UUCSEA 06/14/09 Richards / 2 of 5 doctrines over the centuries have included exile (as Arius himself experienced), prison, torture…and even death. Death.

Michael Servetus lived from 1511 to 1553 (information and quotations drawn from “The Epic of Unitarianism: Original Writings from the History of Liberal Religion by David B. Parke). Reading the Bible as a young man, and witnessing the corruptions in the Catholicism of his day, he welcomed the Protestant Reformation as an opportunity to restore Christianity to the religion expressed by Jesus himself. He also saw it as an opportunity to rid Christianity of the doctrine of the Trinity, as it was nowhere supported in his reading of the Gospels and was rather, he felt, an unfortunate attempt to view Christianity through the confusing lens of Greek philosophy.

In accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, Servetus wrote, Christians “have become…[people] without any God. For as soon as we try to think about God, we are turned aside to three phantoms, so that no kind of unity remains in our conception. But what else is being without God but being unable to think about God, when there is always presented to our understanding a haunting kind of confusion of three beings, by which we are forever deluded into supposing that we are thinking about God.”

Being nothing if not direct, which helped to stoke the anger of men like John Calvin with whom Servetus carried on a lengthy correspondence, Servetus wrote of the Trinitarians: “They seem to be living in another world while they dream of such things; for the kingdom of heaven know none of this nonsense, and it is in another way, unknown to them, that Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit…”

For just such comments, and for his unending persistence in freely stating and publishing his views on theology--even under threat of imprisonment; captured by the French Inquisition and escaping; mocked and derided by Protestant reformers who feared his radical views—because Servetus would not stop speaking passionately about the religion that he loved so dearly and sought to pass along in the purest form he could imagine, he was sentenced to death in Geneva at the hands of those who, in other circumstances, would have been tried as heretics themselves by the Catholic Church. The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, maybe seeking to show that he was as serious about doctrine as the Catholic Church had been, sought to silence Michael Servetus by the most extreme means possible. After angrily breaking off his correspondence with Servetus, Calvin wrote to a friend that if Servetus ever came to Geneva he would make sure that he did not leave the city alive.

He made good on his promise. Servetus boldly (foolishly, some might say) attended a service of Calvin’s and was captured, imprisoned, tried and sentenced to death.

This is from the sentence pronounced against Servetus by the Syndics of Geneva:

[W]e…judges of criminal cases in this city… judge that you, Servetus, have for a long time promulgated false and thoroughly heretical doctrine, despising all…corrections and that you have with malicious and perverse obstinacy sown and divulged even in printed books opinions against God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit…And you have had neither shame nor horror of setting yourself against…the Holy Trinity, and so you have obstinately tried to infect the world with your stinking heretical poison…For these and other reasons, desiring to purge the Church of God of such infection and cut off the rotten member, having taken counsel with our citizens and having invoked the name of God to give just judgment…speaking in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we now in writing give final sentence and condemn you, Michael Servetus, to be bound and…attached to a stake and burned with Religion by the Numbers: 3 Taking a Second Look at the Trinity UUCSEA 06/14/09 Richards / 3 of 5 your book to ashes. And so you shall finish your days and give an example to others who would commit the like.

Calvin made one plea of mercy on Servetus’ behalf…He suggested that Servetus be beheaded with a sword rather than burned. His request was rejected. Servetus was burned at the stake with his book, The Restitution of Christianity, bound to his body. It was a long and painful death, and at one point Servetus cried out:

“O Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me!” An onlooker purportedly commented that if Servetus had been able to say “Eternal Son of God” rather than “Son of the Eternal God,” he may have been saved from the fire. That close. But Michael Servetus could not do it.

So where does that leave us today? Trinity Sunday was celebrated by many Christian churches last week…Am I suggesting we plan a big counter-celebration for next year? Am I attempting to convince you of the superiority of the historical Unitarian concept of God? Am I trying to out any Trinitarian believers who might be with us today?

No. No on all counts. After one of the history classes I led, a member asked if a Trinitarian Christian could be part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation today. My answer? Absolutely. They are and will be welcome here.

You see, the truly destructive piece of the history that I’ve shared does not lie within the doctrine of the Trinity; it lies within the way in which that doctrine was held, as unquestionable; as immovable; as Truth with a capital ‘T,’ so very important that it justified the pain, imprisonment, and even death of those who disagreed.

John Calvin did not repent of his part in the death of Servetus; indeed, he defended it:

Whoever shall maintain that wrong is done to heretics and blasphemers in punishing them makes himself an accomplice in their crime and guilty as they are…it is God who speaks, and clear it is what law he will have kept in the church…we spare not kin, nor blood of any, and forget all humanity when the matter is to combat for His glory.

The fault lies not in the concept of the Trinity, but in the confusion of a human conception of God with God and in the justification of the most brutal actions in the name of that God.

Karen Armstrong imagines a very different function for the doctrine of the Trinity; not to convince Christians that they hold the ultimate description of God, but rather to remind them that “the divine essence lay beyond their grasp.” In other words, that very confusing movement of Trinitarian doctrine that so frustrated our liberal religious ancestors, from one to three to one to three, can be used to remind us that we will never be able to rest, once and for all, on the definitive answer to the mystery of life.

And Christianity joins with many other religious and philosophical traditions in settling on the number three as a way into that mystery (information drawn from The Mystery of Numbers by Annemarie Schimmel):

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Lao-Tzu, the great Taoist thinker, says: “The Tao produces unity, unity produces duality, duality produces trinity, and the triad produces all things.”

Ancient Sumerian deities, Anu, Enlil, and Ea correspond to heaven, air, and earth; while ancient Babylon worshipped the astral deities of moon, sun and Venus (or Ishtar).

The mystery religion of Egypt consisted of Isis, Osiris, and their son (the savior) Horus;

Hinduism has the Trinity of Brahma (the creator), Shiva (the destroyer), and Vishnu (the sustainer);

Buddhists recognize the three jewels (sources of salvation, places of refuge) as the Buddha, the teachings (or the Dharma), and community (or Sangha).

The avowedly monotheistic Shiite Muslims express their devotion in a triune phrase:

“There is no God but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God. Ali is the friend of God.”

And we Unitarian Universalists seem drawn to groupings of three as we speak of “justice, equity and compassion” in our Principles and “justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love” in our Sources.

There is something about three.

Think about how often we read and hear groupings of three. David Bowman, of Precise Edit, writes:

Using a series of three helps the reader understand what you are writing, helps him or her organize the information mentally, and creates a sense of urgency. Using a series of more than three becomes a bit cumbersome and less easy to understand or organize. Using a series of two ideas simply doesn't have the same impact

(unless you are providing two contrasting statements like we just did).

Three is undoubtedly one of the more universally popular entries in this series of sermons, “Religion by the Numbers.” And it overflows the confines of theology to pervade a variety of disciplines and cultural expressions.

Good things come in threes; bad things come in threes.

How many blind mice?

Goldilocks and…how many bears?

Three strikes, you’re out; three outs, get out in the field.

Solid, liquid, gas.

Religion by the Numbers: 3 Taking a Second Look at the Trinity UUCSEA 06/14/09 Richards / 5 of 5

Length, height, width.

Past, present, future.

Morning, noon, and night.

Beginning, middle, end.

Which is my cue to find an ending for this sermon, I suppose.

As we ponder our own liberal religious history as it relates to the Trinity, I think it is important that we embrace our heretical roots and continue to challenge any doctrine that claims complete and uncontestable truth.

But in the spirit of open-hearted understanding, I trust that we will not confuse the doctrine itself with the harm which was done in its name. The Trinity can be seen as speaking to what is apparently a human tendency to describe things in threes. The doctrine of the Trinity may also have the purpose, as Karen Armstrong suggests, not unlike the Buddhist koan or the Hindu brahmodya, of deliberately frustrating our understanding not so that we will fearfully grasp onto it tighter in the name of faith, but so that we may confront the fact that no such doctrine sufficiently explains ultimate reality. It reminds us that, face to face with the mystery of life, we will never be able to understand, articulate or communicate it perfectly, but that it is another innate human tendency to never give up the effort. Father Figure Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 06/21/09

Mothers Day…then Fathers Day.

Mothers Day in May…then a few weeks later, Fathers Day in June. Seems like something of an afterthought doesn’t it? Mothers! And then, oh yeah, Fathers.

Historically, it appears that it was something of an afterthought; or maybe best to say that it was not an afterthought so much as an understandable extension of Mothers Day celebrations.

The first Fathers Day service was held on July 5, 1908 at what was then the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church and what is now the Central United Methodist Church of Fairmont, West Virginia. As the first Mothers Day service was held in the church just a couple months prior to that date, and as one woman sought a way to commemorate the hundreds of men who had died in a mining explosion that year (many of them fathers), she, along with the minister, hit upon the idea of having a Fathers Day service.

Sonora Smartt Dodd of Spokane, Washington in 1909 had not heard about that service of the previous year in West Virginia, but came up with the idea on her own. Her mother had died in childbirth when Sonora was just 16 after which Sonora helped her father raise the younger six children. As she listened to a Mothers Day sermon, she wondered why there was not a corresponding celebration of fathers. She approached the Spokane Washington Ministerial Alliance with her idea and a Father's Day was celebrated June 19, 1910 in Spokane, Washington.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson came to Spokane and spoke at Father's Day services. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day. In 1972, President Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day to be held on the 3rd Sunday of June each year. On June 9, 2008 the House of Representatives passed a bill that calls on fathers across the United States to use Father’s Day to reconnect and rededicate themselves to their children's lives, to spend Father's Day with their children, and to express their love and support for their children.

So Fathers Day has become a reasonable companion to Mothers Day, borne from its rib one might say, but whereas Mothers Day has noble if tangled roots in the peace movement, inviting people to honor their mothers but also inviting mothers to wield their natural power for important social change, Fathers Day still seems to me like…well, an afterthought. If there had not been a Mothers Day, there is nothing to suggest that there would ever have been a Fathers Day. In introducing the bill in 1913, Representative J. Hampton Moore of Philadelphia even termed it a holiday “upon which as an expression of sentiment corresponding to that of Mothers Day, the rose, irrespective of color, shall be regarded as the emblem.”

A rose? Really? We couldn’t even get our own expression of sentiment? The whole idea of a flower didn’t go over with many of the men of his time who, even if they loved roses, were culturally Father Figure UUCSEA 06/21/09 Richards / 2 of 4 conditioned never to admit such a thing. One smart-aleck quipped that the dandelion was the appropriate flower for the day because "the more it is trampled on, the more it grows.”

And critics of the time were pitiless as they wondered aloud where this holiday trend might take the country: Grandparents Day? Maiden Auntie’s Day? Bachelor Uncle’s Day? House Pet Day? Clean Up Your House Day (which would seem like a natural companion to House Pet Day). Secretaries Day? Bosses Day? Trash Collectors Day? Ministers Day? Please, stop!

And as it was modeled on Mothers Day, Fathers Day comes with the same baggage; the same questions for us today. What is the purpose of such holidays? In the case of Mothers Day, some of the early advocates felt that it could be used as a call to action, inspiring the mothers of the world to take reponsibility for the well-being of the children of the world. Some felt that it was a celebration to be enjoyed by individuals and families paying respect to their own mothers. Some felt that it was a celebration of motherhood in general, the qualities and traits of mothering.

Fathers Day suffers from the same fuzzy focus: some see it as a time to pay tribute to one’s own father. Some feel that it is a celebration of not only fathers and fatherhood, but the qualities of fathering as practiced by mentors of all sorts. This week, President Obama used it as a springboard to call fathers to take responsibility for their children, to discover their manhood in their active and involved fatherhood. The President, most often quite careful in his choice of words, talked himself into one of the pitfalls inherent in a Fathers Day focus:

He said, “We need fathers to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one.”

Now what he most likely meant is that what makes you a father (in the full and most moral sense of the word) is not the ability to have a child—which is nothing more than involuntary biological potential— but the courage to raise a child—which is the voluntary, intentional assumption of responsibility and connection. That’s what makes you a father. A parent. No argument there. But what he said was, “what makes you a man.”

The truth that gets lost in our focus on Mothers Day / Fathers Day is that you can be a man without being a father. And you can be a woman without being a mother. And you can be a family without being a mother/father/children/nuclear family. There is a tendency on such holidays, as I mentioned on Mothers Day, to oversimplify, to romanticize, to look around at our admittedly mixed up, messed up, shook up world and to sentimentally yearn for (and to then create) a simpler time in our memory that never really existed. To imagine that the problems of our age can be overcome if we just adhere to and stubbornly defend a particular configuration of family, the Perfect Family Recipe.

Now don’t get me wrong…I have nothing against calling people to personal responsibility. I have nothing against pointing out the suffering that is caused when a father abandons his family. Writer Rick Bragg powerfully evokes the painful presence of a father’s absence when he recounts an older writer friend urging Bragg to face his pain and write about his father. “My boy,” he told Bragg, “there is no place you can go where he will not be.”

But, along with irresponisble absence, I also wish to point out the harm that can be caused by irresponsible judgment; an immovable certainty about what is right. Kafka’s letter to his father captures this latter harm. Franz Kafka is now heralded as one of the most important writers in the twentieth Father Figure UUCSEA 06/21/09 Richards / 3 of 4 century—many would say one of the most important writers of all time—but to his father, apparently, he was an utterly ungrateful failure. Son Franz writes:

What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your own power.

There is a pressure--maybe weighing most heavily on fathers—that one should have a firm handle on what is right; what is proper; what is best; what is successful; what is acceptable; and that one should instill that in one’s children; that the infusion of this certainty will somehow protect them against harm. But all too often, rather than protecting the child, the judgment that accompanies this unrealistic endeavor only serves to sever the connection between parent and child; it is a careless and destructive use of power. The awful rigidity that often accompanies such a purpose ensures that the parent cannot bend to allow for the individuality of the child, and the relationship breaks. Because there is this imperative to simplify what is not simple—that being life itself—the father, the parent, causes suffering and shame.

And so does a society. This kind of rigid certainty on a societal level, in defining marriage and family, causes a similar harm, a corresponding disconnection, subverting the very values that it was meant to protect. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, in opening up Paul’s image of God the Father, point out that Paul was not seeking to attach a gender to God; he was using the image of the homemaker, to point out that all whom he addressed were part of God’s family and to ask some pointed questions about life in that home:

“Is there a just, fair, and equal distribution of rights and responsibilities, of duties and privileges? Are all the children well fed, clothed, and sheltered? Does everyone have enough? Do some members get far more than they need, while others get far less?”

I have nothing against some deep reflection and bold action regarding parenting as it relates to the kind of future we are leaving our children and their children and their children’s children. I have nothing against a vigorous debate and engagement in exploring what will strengthen our families and benefit our children. And I have no doubt that Mothers Day and Fathers Day can serve as opportunities to call us to that action and reflection.

But if our focus is really the well-being of children, why not have (as kids are always suggesting) a Childrens Day, where everyone can pause to reflect, whatever their role and sphere of influence, on the impact they have on the children of the world? Why not call for engagement with the questions of how we support families of all configurations? Why not highlight, not the gender of parents or the make-up of the family, but the qualities that we know make a difference; qualities like love and discipline and encouragement and support and shared activities and a diversity of adult role models and community connection and hope…How do we nurture hope for all families, gay and straight, single parent families, extended families, step families…how do we nurture hope for all people?

Speaking as a father, I can tell you absolutely, positively…well, I can’t tell you much absolutely and positively. I have struggled with how to do it right, at every stage of our son’s life. I fight off regret about things I did or left undone. I worry about the effects of wrestling with all my own issues on his life. I struggle to bring my highest self to the task of parenting; to act always in his best interest, and not my own comfort; to face the hard stuff. I love him deeply, which can be a profound joy and can also Father Figure UUCSEA 06/21/09 Richards / 4 of 4 ache like no other ache I’ve ever felt. I respect him, and I judge him too harshly, and I’ve snapped at him about little things and I’ve let him off too easy on bigger things, and I nag him, and I joke with him, and I don’t listen to him, and I do listen, and I keep trying to be that guide whom love sustains. And if I can be successful in giving him just one thing--besides my love which is a given, a constant, a presence that will be there no matter what—if I can be successful at passing along only one other thing to him, it will be hope.

President Obama said, [T]he final lesson we must learn as fathers is also the greatest gift we can pass on to our children - and that is the gift of hope. I'm not talking about an idle hope that's little more than blind optimism or willful ignorance of the problems we face. I'm talking about hope as that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we're willing to work for it and fight for it. If we are willing to believe.

Creating hope is a responsibility. It is a responsibility that this congregation has taken on in the work of our mission. It is one which we seek to attain, not with the rigid certainty and judgment inspired by fear, but with a commitment to open-hearted understanding and acceptance and a deep faith that love will— always--guide us. Paradise Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 06/28/09

Opening Words – (#422, Genesis 28) Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

Sermon Sometimes we use “paradise” to describe an event in our lives. The travel brochures urge us to “Come vacation in Paradise.” Thinking back on a peaceful time, when the world around us seemed like it was exactly as it should be, we may say, “It was Paradise.” Gazing out on the ocean or across huge vistas from atop a mountain or up at a sky dark enough to see more stars than we ever could have imagined existed, slung across the night like handfuls of diamonds, we think, “This is paradise.”

But we don’t mean Paradise exactly, do we? The notion of Paradise holds within it an unreachable ideal, an unattainable perfection—unreachable in that we have pushed it out beyond this life altogether; unattainable in that we have located it in a world outside of time itself, eternally perfectly shimmering just beyond the horizon of our mortal lives.

The advertisement--“Come vacation in Paradise,”--is saying, frankly, this is as close as you’re gonna get here in this life, so fork over the money and enjoy yourself…but the gritty reality of travel arrangements and accommodations and dealing with people—the fact that the actuality rarely matches the promise of those brochures, only serves to push Paradise a little further away.

The memory of a peaceful time, when our heart seemed to beat in perfect time with the cosmos, may elicit the feeling that that was Paradise. But if so, the very fact that it is a memory means that it is Paradise Lost, and there is no clear way to regain it, to trace our way back, to recreate that feeling…

We may continue to have those moments, in touch with the ocean, the mountains, the night sky—in touch with the unfathomable connection of oneself to the All—and we may think, “This is Paradise.” But as writer and teacher J. Krishnamurti points out, when I think, “I am happy,” I have just removed myself from the present experience of being happy and can only experience it as a memory of being happy. Realizing that the happiness has passed to be replaced by the thought, I become anxious about how I can recapture happiness, and how I can make it last this time—and such anxiety, of course, only works against the possibility of happiness.

And maybe a similar thing happens with Paradise. These fleeting moments we experience give us some taste of that ideal we call Paradise. We receive glimpses of eternity--as Sara Moores Campbell says in our hymnal—but Paradise itself is said to await us—or the most fortunate among us, according to traditional Christian theology—Paradise awaits us, in its full eternal perfection, on the other side of death. There, it is said, your happiness will not disappear. There, it is said, your joy will last forever. There, it is said, what is broken and painful will be whole and perfect…forever.

Paradise UUCSEA 06/28/09 Richards / 2 of 4

A difficult thing to wrap our mind around, isn’t it? Whereas Dante could be horrifically vivid about the depths of hell, his writing becomes much more abstract in the realm of paradise. He begins his journey into Paradise with an interesting disclaimer:

I was in that heaven which receives more of His light. He who comes down from there can neither know nor tell what he has seen,

He who comes down from there can neither know nor tell what he has seen…you would expect his volume on Paradise to be a short book then. It isn’t. Dante presses on as best he can, describing as much of the holy kingdom as he could store in his mind…but only in light of that introductory warning that all he can say is not enough.

This recognition that one could never fully capture Paradise continued after Dante. When Franz Lizst wrote his Dante Symphony, Richard Wagner convinced him that it would be foolish to even attempt to express the joys of Paradise, so Lizst ended, rather too abruptly some critics said, with Purgatory.

But if tangible descriptions of Paradise elude us, if it seems terribly distant from this messy mortal life we lead, we are at the same time assured in traditional Christian theology that we are meant for Paradise; that it is the goal that we spend this life striving toward; that it is, in effect, our true home, while this earth is but a way station.

The dearly departed has gone home to be with the Lord. There’s a better home a’waiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky. That sweet chariot is coming for to carry me home. When His chosen ones shall gather to their home beyond the skies, and the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.

Here we are on earth…but heaven is our home. Isn’t that what many Christians believe?

Yes, says Anglican Bishop and Bible scholar, N.T. Wright, and that is precisely where many Christians have it wrong. He explains in an interview:

If you say, “This world is not my home. I’m just a-passin’ through,” then what you’re saying is, “What’s the fuss of trying to do anything about this world?” And you’re saying, “There’s no point in trying to make it a better place.” And that’s not what Christianity teaches…

Most Western Christians have grown up with the idea that the name of game is simply to go to heaven when you die. What I routinely say to people is that heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.

Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world. To Wright, that is not simply a cute phrase…it is sound theology. And Wright, I might add, is not considered a liberal theologian; he is firmly Bible- based. And a good share of accepted Christian notions about heaven, he says, have no Biblical basis.

The hope of Christianity, says Wright, is not heaven; it is a transformed earth. The Second Coming of Christ, says Wright, does not mean that Jesus is simply stopping off on earth to pick us up on his way to heaven: it is not the Great Escape so many yearn for, popularized in the mega-selling Left Behind series, it means He is coming back to Earth…to stay this time. The hope of Christianity, says Wright, is not life after death (although he believes in that); the hope lies in the life after life after death on Earth, as Paradise UUCSEA 06/28/09 Richards / 3 of 4 the earth itself is transformed in accordance with the will of God. Life after death, what many Christians might call heaven, can be seen in Wright’s framework, as only a way station as we await the Second Coming; Heaven, that heaven, is temporary; Earth is—and will be—our eternal home.

Now all of this theology may be foreign to the way you look at things; or it may be vaguely familiar; or it may correspond to your own beliefs. As a rule, we don’t spend much time here speculating on an afterlife. If I can risk generalizing about Unitarian Universalists, whatever our sources of spiritual and ethical inspiration—Christian, Humanist, Buddhist, Wiccan—as Unitarian Universalists we tend to focus mainly on this life, this world. Like Henry David Thoreau, when asked on his deathbed to describe anything he could see of the next life, we say, “One world at a time.” My interest in exploring ideas of Paradise--and Hell and Purgatory in previous sermons--is precisely to examine the ramifications of what we believe and what is popularly believed in our culture on our actions in this life.

I, like Wright, am frightened by an idea, given religious sanction, that earth is a temporary stop and thus not worthy of our work and concern. And what I find exciting about Wright’s particular take on Christian theology is that it places a renewed focus on what happens in this life. Because Earth will be, according to Wright, our home in Paradise, he also affirms that nothing we do here, in this life, will be lost. Indeed, he says, it is the responsibility of the Christian to recognize the kingdom of God that is just waiting to break forth and to work tirelessly toward justice and equity and compassion and environmental responsibility and the will of a just and loving God being done on earth as it is in heaven. When Jesus talked about God’s kingdom, says Wright, he wasn’t talking about escape from this world into another. “Heaven, in the Bible,” says Wright, “is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life.”

When Rita Nakashima Brock, Christian minister and Founding Co-Director of Faith Voices for the Common Good, and Rebecca Ann Parker, minister in dual fellowship with the United Methodist Church and the Unitarian Universalist Association and President and Professor of Theology at Starr King School for the ministry—when these two set out to find early Christian images of the crucifixion, they ran straight into Paradise. There weren’t many images of the crucifixion, but there was an abundance of images of Paradise. This—I love this—intrigued and disconcerted them. They were dismayed to think that early Christians were so obviously obsessed with the afterlife. But they soon came to similar conclusions as Wright about the function of Paradise in Christian theology:

To our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than “heaven” or the afterlife. Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death. However, in the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God.

So while I started out this sermon ready—even excited—to travel along with Dante into transcendent ethereal realms of heaven, I was quickly detoured and ended up right here on good old planet Earth. This is paradise?? Really?

It reminds me that, when people heard that I was working on a sermon about hell, quite a few comments were made on the order of: “I believe that people create their own hell.” You’ve heard that, right? People create their own hell. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

But I haven’t heard the same about Paradise. “People create their own Paradise.” Not quite so simple, is it? Hell, I can create, yes…no problem. I know how to make life miserable. But Paradise…that’s a Paradise UUCSEA 06/28/09 Richards / 4 of 4 considerably taller order. So when we read about Paradise as “this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God”; when we read about Heaven as “the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life,” what can we take away from such statements?

Let me suggest that all attempts to create paradise are probably doomed to failure. The imposition of our own version of paradise onto the world we live in is bound to be frustrated. As the world refuses to conform to our image of Paradise, it will only increase our cynicism; ignite our apathy (if apathy can be ignited); heighten our frustration with other people.

But you’ll notice that neither Wright nor Parker and Brock say anything about creating paradise. They are suggesting that Paraidise exists right alongside the world that we live in, and that our work is to uncover it, to celebrate it, to find it where it is hidden…What if we, like Jacob in the Opening Words, woke up to find that this is paradise? How would our lives change? How would we be with one another? How would we treat the earth and its creatures?

Surely the Lord is in this place—this is Paradise--and I did not know it. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

What if the whole earth was holy ground? What if your front door was the gate of heaven? What if the spirit of life and love was recognized, acknowledged, celebrated in its presence throughout our lives?

Parker and Brock write this:

We reenter this world as sacred space when we love life fiercely and, in the name of love, protect the goodness of earth’s intricate web of life in all its manifold forms. We feast in paradise when we open our hearts to lamentation, to amplitudes of grief for all that has been lost and cannot be repaired… We give thanks for gifts of love that have been ours all along, an ever-widening circle of beauty…We enter fully—heart, mind, soul and strength—into savoring and saving paradise.

Where is our paradise? Where is your paradise? Is it an escape hatch to another world, another life? Or is it a new entrance into this world, transformed by a vision of what is possible, the potential sewn into the very fabric of this mysterious existence we share?

Where is our paradise? In aspiration’s sight, wherein we hope to see arise ten thousand years of right.

Codependence Day Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 07/05/09

Opening Words – (Responsive Reading #468 SLT, George E. Odell) We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted. We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid. We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation, and need to be recalled to our best selves again. We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose, and cannot do it alone. We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs. We need one another in the hour of defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again. We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey. All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.

Reading From Codependent No More (1987) by Melody Beattie: It is natural to want to protect and help the people we care about. It is also natural to want to be affected by and react to the problems of people around us. As a problem becomes more serious and remains unresolved, we become more affected and react more intensely to it.

The word react is important here. However you approach codependency, however you define it, and from whatever frame of reference you choose to diagnose and treat it, codependency is primarily a reactionary process. Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They underreact. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors. Many codependent reactions are reactions to stress and uncertainty of living or growing up with alcoholism and other problems. It is normal to react to stress. It is not necessarily abnormal, but it is heroic and lifesaving to learn how to not react and to act in more healthy ways. Most of us, however, need help to learn to do that.

Sermon We need one another when we mourn… We need one another when we are in trouble… We need one another when we are in despair… We need one another when we cannot do it alone… We need one another in the hour of success… We need one another in the hour of defeat… We need one another when we come to die… All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.

I sometimes think of that reading as the holy whine (w-h-i-n-e).

We need, we need, all our lives we are in need…

But, of course, we do need one another…and we need to feel needed.

Codependence Day UUCSEA 07/05/09 Richards / 2 of 5

We come together here to figure out compassionate, effective responses to human need. It’s right in our mission: creating a welcoming community of caring people where all receive emotional support, intellectual stimulation and respect for their individual spiritual paths…It’s there in our covenant, where we promise to honor and care for each other. We celebrate one another’s joys and share one another’s sorrows and concerns. This congregation seeks to understand, acknowledge, and appropriately respond to human need.

But what does it mean to respond appropriately? And how might reflecting on codependency help us in that endeavor? What is codependency?

We humans start out our lives in total dependence, we grow to achieve some measure of independence, and we ideally come to an awareness of our inescapable interdependence…so where does codependency fit in?

Codependency, on the face of it, sounds okay, doesn’t it? We are dependent in many ways--we never outgrow our need for one another, nor do we outgrow our need to be needed--codependency must mean that we share that dependence. We are dependent…together. We need one another, as our opening words drove home…we need one another and we try to meet the needs of others at the same time. So is that interdependent?…or codependent? All depends. (I just had to say that.)

Codependency speaks to a particular aspect of need and meeting needs. It is notoriously hard to define once and for all, but it is generally regarded as something to avoid rather than embrace.

Here are a few excerpts from Melody Beattie’s book, as she asked people to define codependency:

“Codependency means,” said one woman, “that I’m a caretaker.”

“Codependency,” replied another, “means I’m up to my elbows in alcoholics.”

“It means I’m always looking for someone to glob onto.”

“Codependency,” explained one person, “is knowing all your relationships will either go on and on the same way (painfully), or end the same way (disastrously)…Or both.”

“A codependent person,” writes Melody Beattie in her own definition, “is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.”

In other words, codependency is allowing my desire to control your life control my life. Codependency means allowing my desire to control your life control my life.

Now there may be very good reasons for my desire to control your life. The reason that codependency is so pronounced among the families of alcoholics and addicts is that alcoholics and addicts are so needy. I may, responding to the understandable inclination to help, simply want to take care of the addict. Because an addict’s life, by definition, is out of control, I may seek to exert control. Because an addict’s behavior is destructive, I may seek to manage and minimize the destruction by using whatever emotional tools I can: with comfort and forgiveness; with anger and rage; with ultimatums; with manipulation; with smiles; with tears; with silence; with lectures; by confronting; by avoiding; by changing the subject; by never changing the subject; by hurting; by helping; by hoping; by hiding. Codependence Day UUCSEA 07/05/09 Richards / 3 of 5

But all of that is understandable, right? I’m trying to minimize the harmful effects of another person’s actions by trying to control them. I’m trying to protect me by controlling you. But what the writers on codependency point out is that eventually there is no me left to protect. What began as a way to protect me inevitably results in obliterating me. There is no me left, except as I exist to control you.

So if we say, in very simple terms, that independence is about me, and interdependence is about the relationship between me and you, then codependency is about you. I mean, it’s about me, but really only about how you affect me. It’s about a particularly obsessive way in which I respond to your need or my perception of your need.

Codependency arises most clearly amidst the stress caused by loving someone whose behavior is out of control and destructive. It is a survival tool.

But in a wider sense, I think that codependency probably touches all of our lives. As you heard in the reading: It is natural to want to protect and help the people we care about. It is also natural to want to be affected by and react to the problems of people around us. Codependency has an understandable origin in our attempt to meet our needs and the needs of others. Though it goes awry, it arises from some pretty natural inclinations that follow a somewhat familiar progression:

1. I (as a representative human) have an innate desire to fix what is broken, to help, to respond to need. 2. I tend to feel much more certain about what exactly you need than about what I need. 3. I believe that I know what you need much better than you know what you need. 4. Thus, as your behavior affects me, I have an innate desire to help you (and myself) by giving you what I think you need, by offering advice, by getting you to do what I want (which is, of course, what you need.)

Now, for some reason, when I state this to you in these very simple terms, you have a tendency to get defensive. (What is that about?) You won’t do what I want you to do. So I quickly change course, and rather than being so forthright about my plans to “help” you, I resort to indirect means of influence and manipulation. I figure out ways to try and get you to do what you should have done in the first place. In attempting to control your behavior, I change my behavior…Voila! Codependency.

Let’s take a quick look at our mission and imagine the congregation embracing codependency as opposed to interdependency:

The mission of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona is to create a welcoming community of caring people where all receive the very best advice we can give you, intellectual stimulation to allow you to understand the superiority of our opinions and respect for the spiritual path we have chosen for your own good.

Our covenant? As we journey together, sure of the truth, endlessly waiting for others to catch up, and caught in the web of codependency, we covenant to humor and correct one another.

You see what I mean? It is almost diametrically opposed to everything we claim that we are.

Codependence Day UUCSEA 07/05/09 Richards / 4 of 5

And I don’t even say that because I find our way to be more virtuous; it is because, to me, it is most practical.

If I thought that I could save you, or that you could save me, I would covenant to affirm and promote respect for the codependent web of all life…But the other thing about codependent behavior is this: it never achieves its goal. It never changes you and it only hurts me. This is what leads to one of the painful insights I began with:

“Codependency,” explained one person, “is knowing all your relationships will either go on and on the same way (painfully), or end the same way (disastrously)…Or both.”

The tragedy inherent in codependency is that it is doomed to failure.

Quick poll:

How many of you have tried to change someone else?

Next question:

How many, solely through your own efforts, succeeded in changing the other person?

Now, listen, I’m not saying that people never change. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what it is that inspires that change. But I am saying that change only happens when an individual awakens, within themselves, to the possibility and desirability of that change. It cannot be imposed, except on the most superficial level, from the outside. And nobody else can do it for you--just like nobody else can walk that lonesome valley from the old song—nobody else can walk it for you. Nobody else can want it for you.

So what about the mission of our congregation? If change must occur at an individual level; if we are not out to change others, what are we doing? What works in fulfilling our mission?

We can’t change other people, but we can provide a community that nurtures and supports positive transformation, increasing understanding and inspiring compassionate action. What works? Back to our covenant...

We covenant to honor and care for each other.

We covenant to honor one another. What does that look like? What does that mean? If I covenant to honor the imperfect, screwed-up mess that is you, how will you ever change? Ah, but that is codependent thinking. That is worrying about you rather than thinking about me. That is trying to control you rather than trying to understand myself.

By honoring you, I become aware of you as a separate individual with your own experience and understandings and challenges and insights…with your own life, separate from my own and from my experience of you. It sounds simple, obvious, but we spend a good share of our lives without that explicit awareness of others. By practicing the honoring of you I increase my own compassion. My opinions are now much less important than my understanding, and even that acceptance that goes beyond my understanding. This is the fertile ground of transformation. Codependence Day UUCSEA 07/05/09 Richards / 5 of 5

And when someone honors me in that way, I am able to be who I am; to rest from expectation and manipulation and worries about what you think I should be. At the same time, it inspires me to follow my best self; to reach for what is good and true rather than defend what is broken and twisted. And this experience of acceptance allows me to offer that to another, to honor another similarly.

Can you imagine a world full of people honoring one another? Can you imagine a world transformed by that kind of caring?

And though we have let go of the idea that we can control one another, though we have pledged to accept one another, that is not the same thing as “anything goes.” That is not the same as accepting any and all behavior.

That is the very reason that we have a covenant. You cannot change me, but you have the right to hold me accountable to the covenant of our congregation. It is perfectly appropriate to respectfully call one another back to that promise which sustains us.

One of the ways to rid ourselves of codependent behavior is to reflect on our own motivations, to be clear about expectations, and to set appropriate boundaries based on those expectations. The covenant is our promise to one another and our expectation of one another, and we meet it imperfectly and haltingly and clumsily, and we meet it graciously and proudly and beautifully, and we keep it before us in our order of service and our newsletter and on our web site and read it at the beginning of each Board meeting because it is meant to shape our life together and strengthen us to fulfill our mission.

We gather as a covenantal religious community. We do not come together around a single set of beliefs, but we gather around the promise we have made to treat each other with respect and compassion as we each seek out and nurture our own best selves, while encouraging others to do the same.

We reject codependent behavior and the futile goal of trying to control one another. We practice honoring and caring for one another in ways that we hope will spread around the world. We acknowledge our need for one another and our need to be needed.

The promise that sustains this community can hold a myriad of different beliefs and values and experiences, and in that spirit I welcome you all today.

Thoreau-ly Satisfied Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 07/12/09 Readings Excerpts from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all-looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck- I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry…

A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil…

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run…

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do…

My greatest skill has been to want but little…

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the pole-star in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

Sermon Today is the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau.

If Unitarian Universalists recognized saints, there is little doubt that Thoreau would be one. His call to notice, respect and celebrate the natural world; his affirmation of individual thought and conscience in opposition to the pressure to conform; his critique of the powers of oppression and greed; all of these resonate with us still. Though he left the Unitarian church upon becoming an adult, it is his influence on our tradition, rather than our tradition’s influence upon him, that has resulted in countless Unitarian Universalist sermons and classes and book groups devoted to his life and work. There is even a Henry David Thoreau Unitarian Universalist congregation of Fort Bend County in Stafford, TX.

Yes, he would be—in an informal way, already is—one of our saints; our heroes; our prophets.

And that, I have to think, would make him laugh. Thoreau-ly Satisfied UUCSEA 07/12/09 Richards / 2 of 5

Because a funny thing happens with our saints, our prophets, our heroes, our saviors…we create stories around them. We exaggerate their actions and distort their lives with our adulation. They become symbols of our own opinions; desires; aspirations. We remove them from their own time and place, from their own flawed and fumbling humanity, and we create gods that we can worship, that we can club each other over the head with, that we can use to justify our own insights or prove the other person wrong.

And, not surprisingly, we eventually grow to resent these saints in their lofty positions. We look for chinks in the armor of divinity (which they never asked to wear, I might add). We find those places where they fail to reach the ideal that we have imposed (did Thoreau go into town and eat at restaurants during his Walden life?); we sniff out the compromises they made (didn’t he still bring his laundry home to his mom?); we seize upon every tidbit that shows they were only human after all (wasn’t there a bit of grandstanding in his insistence that he be put in jail?) and we pull the statues we have created off their pedestals to watch them smash on the hard, cold, merciless ground of everyday life.

And we go about our business.

Henry David Thoreau has something to say to us about our business. It is important that we not let our adulation drown out his words. It is important that we not let the unauthorized biographical details distract us from his words. It is important that we listen, to a man, a person like you and me, who took some time to look around, to think deeply, and to write down his thoughts to share with whoever wished to read them.

And with that said, I will admit to being resistant to Thoreau’s work. As I read my way through the beginning of Walden, I found myself getting a little angry and defensive.

And that, of course, was not all about Thoreau. I have to own some of that, so consider this my public confession. I am not good at nature. For those of you birders who haven’t already figured it out, I don’t know the names of any birds. I can’t identify flowers and plants. I am not a big hiker, mountain climber, swimmer, biker…sure, I’ve camped a little, but you would not take me along on the survival training expedition as an instructor. You probably would not want me along as a student…it would be too much work to make sure I was okay. Outside of typing, I do not work with my hands, and if you saw me try to drive a nail into the wall, you would probably marvel at the fact that I can type. So reading Thoreau--and especially reading Thoreau with the added baggage of my image of Saint Thoreau--was an intimidating experience. These are the words of probably the most famous nature writer of all time, the granddaddy of environmentalism, a prophet of Transcendentalism, a saint of Unitarian Universalism, for goodness sake, a tradition which I represent and uphold as minister of this congregation…and what was my very-mature first reaction?

“Yeah, yeah, you moved to the woods, you built your own cabin, you studied your surroundings, you lived on little or nothing, AND you can write beautiful prose…great for you! Just stop lecturing me.”

And once I came to grips with my own inner childishness, I thought again about what I had read. It did seem to have the tone of a lecture. This is what I did. See how much sense it makes? Why aren’t you doing this?

Thoreau-ly Satisfied UUCSEA 07/12/09 Richards / 3 of 5

But as I took a step back from my own defensiveness, my own underlying certainty about what I should be doing and about what I fear I can’t do…when I took a step back and looked again at Thoreau, I realized that, seen from this perspective, Walden is all about expectations. Walden, though it can come off as a lecture, was actually a bold, brash, sometimes-even-bratty response to lectures that Thoreau had probably heard, to expectations that he had felt from family and friends and the society-at-large about what was reasonable, practical, possible, and desirable. Walden is not, I believe, meant to impose expectations; it is a ragged, poetic, prophetic, impassioned, incessant plea to rid ourselves of the imposition of expectations from outside. Thoreau, I think, would be very disappointed if he thought that his work was being used to spread yet another layer of expectations on top of the many through which we wade throughout our lives.

“I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead.”

It is not hard to see why Walden is a popular book among youth. It is about finding oneself amidst the many and varied pressures, opinions, and pronouncements of those who tell us they know best. He is adamant, sometimes outrageous even, in insisting that we must free ourselves of even the best advice if we are to hear our own souls speak. He writes:

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young…I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

I wish to point out that that was Thoreau, not me. The old have no advice for the young? The wisest person has learned nothing of value? We may have our arguments with that, but I think this should be understood in terms of Thoreau’s own context and in terms of his purpose. This is less about the value of anyone else’s wisdom and more about the value of your own wisdom…you, the reader, the individual who is taking the time to listen to Thoreau. This is less about the merit of anyone else’s words and more about the precious nature of your own voice that speaks within, faintly, a still small voice, as it were, that is too often drowned out by the hubbub of the everyday and the constant stream of conversation and the endless chatter of everyone else’s best intentions.

And I mentioned the appeal of these ideas to the young: I’ve talked to young people who are intent on finding a way of integrity that allows them to engage life with the power of their own clear purpose, undeterred by the well-intentioned expectations of others. They are so intent on listening for that inner voice that it can seem as if they have closed their eyes and stuck their fingers in their ears and are babbling “lalalalalalalalalalalalal” as you speak. It looks like stubbornness, defiance, avoidance…and there may be some parts of that, just as there are in Thoreau. But it may also be because they are desperately trying to hear their own voice. They are trying to shut out distraction so they can, in common usage, hear themselves think.

And though it is easy to see this process as a part of growing into adulthood, really it follows us throughout our lives. You can hear it in talking to young people, yes, but I also spoke to an elderly lady Thoreau-ly Satisfied UUCSEA 07/12/09 Richards / 4 of 5 in a hospital bed who was explaining why a friend was mad at her. “I had to stop talking to her on the phone,” she said, and then reflected for a bit. “Everyone is full of good advice,” she continued, “but it just doesn’t fit for me.”

We can be somewhere in the middle of our adulthood, when circumstances suddenly change for us and all the expected outcomes abruptly vanish from our sight. People tell us how to get on the track, or how to get on a new track, or tell us why that old track failed (the most helpful kind of advice…thank you very much). And sometimes--though it is counter-intuitive; though common sense tells us we have to do something NOW—sometimes we need to clamp our eyes shut, stick our fingers in our ears, and go, “lalalalalalalalalalalalala” all the way to Walden pond; all the way back to ourselves; all the way to an eventual silence that will allow us to hear our own words when we are finally ready to speak.

It is not easy. Walden, in its sometimes puzzling details, in its outrageous exclamations, in its sustained evocation of the life and thought of a complicated individual at a particular period in his life, is not a call for us all to meet Thoreau’s expectations, but an invitation to dredge up all of our own expectations, and all of the expectations we carry from those around us, and to examine them in the unforgiving light of the sun, and to examine them again by the pure light of the moon and stars, and to feel with our fingers their contours when there is no light by which to see, through those dark nights of the soul. We are creatures of the natural world; indeed, there is nothing else but the natural world, and the interesting structures and systems of one of its most puzzling creatures. Do our creations, our desires, our expectations truly serve us? Do they satisfy? Do they help us to live deeply and suck out all the marrow of life? Or do they suck the very marrow out of us?

It was interesting to me to find in a book entitled, Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America by Jay Parini, that Walden may well have been, in parts, a response to another famous memoir, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin chronicled his own success in moving up the class ladder through hard work, industriousness and wise business practices…indeed, columnist David Brooks has called Franklin Our Founding Yuppie. Parini suggests that Thoreau may have delighted in turning some of Franklin’s ideals that had wound their way into American culture on their head. While Franklin spoke of how much he saved, Thoreau spoke of how little he required. While Franklin bragged of how many hours he worked, Thoreau bragged of how little of the day he spent working. Thoreau expected something different of himself and life. “My greatest skill has been to want but little,” he says.

But he does call us to another kind of work. The point is not simply to throw off the expectations and assumptions of others; it is to continually seek out our own. To question our own assumptions. To rise up to meet our own ideals and potential. To live deliberately.

“[T]he cost of a thing,”--writes Thoreau, in one of the many brilliant tidbits that are scattered throughout the book—“the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

That single realization could change the world, but it must grow from the fertile soil of our own intentional reflection on the results of our expectations.

Walden is finally, I believe, a hope-filled book—a naïve one, some might say. Thoreau believes, as many others of our saints and prophets and heroes have, that awakened individuals can change the world. Walden, like so many of our “sacred” texts, acts like an alarm clock. Thoreau-ly Satisfied UUCSEA 07/12/09 Richards / 5 of 5

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

So may it be… Sailing the Dead Sea Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 07/26/09

Reading Slightly adapted from the introduction to The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (1996) by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward Cook (pgs. 8 & 43): What exactly are the Dead Sea Scrolls? The objects themselves are documents written with a carbon- based ink usually on animal skins, although some are inscribed on papyrus. The scrolls were written right to left using no punctuation except for an occasional paragraph indentation—no periods, commas, quotation marks, or any of the other reader helps to which we are so accustomed. Indeed, in some cases there are not even spaces between words: the letters simply run together in a continuous stream. The codex, the early form of the books with pages bound on one side, had not yet been invented, so the “pages,” or columns, were written consecutively on the scroll. To read them one slowly unrolled the scroll, and then, to be polite, rewrapped it. [Be Kind: Rewind!] Not a few of the scrolls testify that the ancients sometimes failed to “be kind.” The scrolls are written in several languages and half a dozen scripts, and though all are religious texts, within that category their contents are amazingly varied.

Translation is the last step in an intricate and frequently uncertain process of reconstruction …Translators betray both what they translate and readers of the translations. By their very effort they violate the original. Yet we are not unduly concerned, nor in the least repentant. Any damage is for a worthy cause and is not irreparable. Much of the beauty, the concision, the power of the Hebrew and Aramaic in which the scrolls are couched will continue to reside, untranslatable, where nature has decreed it must. And we are not really traitors to you, the reader, for we have drawn your attention to our betrayal from the very first…If we have perhaps transported at least most of the meaning of the words across time, space, and linguistic distance, we shall have succeeded in a principal aim…

Sermon What is in the Dead Sea Scrolls? What do they say? What do they reveal? Something important, right? Something huge. Something that makes the Dead Sea Scrolls “the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times,” as proclaimed by Professor William Foxwell Albright, professor at The Johns Hopkins University, who was among the first people told about their discovery. Something that has turned “Dead Sea Scrolls” into a phrase that is used like “Xerox,” “Kleenex,” or “Velcro,” to mean not only what it specifically means but to stand in for a whole category of things, leading to such interesting headlines in major newspapers such as: “Buddhist ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ uncovered by British Library,” and “Afghanistan wants its ‘Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism’ back from UK.”

Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism? Were these Buddhist manuscripts found near the Dead Sea? No. Do they have some connection to Judaism? No. These were scrolls from the 1st Century B.C.E. that give clues to the early history of Buddhism just as the Dead Sea Scrolls--composed between 250 B.C.E. and 70 C.E.--offer previously undiscovered clues to the early history of Judaism. So rather than saying “Ancient Manuscripts of Great Importance to Piecing Together the History of Buddhism,” these journalists used what they figured would be culturally recognizable shorthand: “The Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism.”

In the introduction to the new translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the reading, the authors write: Sailing the Dead Sea UUCSEA 07/26/09 Richards / 2 of 5

Like Shangri-la, the term “Dead Sea Scrolls” has the power to evoke images and emotions even in those who have only a vague idea of what they are. The term is redolent of enigma, of intrigue, perhaps even of sacred mysteries; hovering in the background are images of caves, scrolls, barren deserts, and intense scholars hunched over tiny scraps of leather…

From their discovery in 1947 by a Bedouin goatherd who, searching for a lost goat, threw a stone into a cave and heard it shatter a clay jar inside to the introduction of ever-advancing computer technology in the study and analysis of the text right up to the present day, enigma and intrigue runs throughout the story of the scrolls.

There is something captivating about the image of many Bedouin goatherds scouring the caves in the area after they hear of the discovery and sale of the first scrolls, taking their fragments to market, oblivious of their real worth.

There is something ominous about these documents, so important to the understanding of early Judaism, finding their way to a Jewish scholar in Jerusalem just as Israel is recognized as a state by the United Nations.

There is something mysterious and frustrating about the secrecy of the first team of scholars that worked on the scrolls. Far too small a group to ever finish the laborious task of putting the puzzle of fragments together within their lifetimes, they were notoriously close-mouthed about their work and refused to allow other scholars access. There were charges of deliberate exclusion of non-Christian (and specifically non-Catholic) scholars, as though they were poised to hush the release of any revelations that could be considered damaging to the doctrines of the Church. As this kind of secrecy lasted for over 30 years, one Oxford professor called the closely held scroll material the “academic scandal of the century.”

There is something shocking about the seemingly cavalier way that this first team went about the delicate and painstaking business of piecing together fragments and preserving ancient manuscripts, as people who worked on the team revealed that windows were left open in the room with the scrolls, allowing dirt and sunlight to damage the scrolls, and further that some of the men were smoking cigarettes as they carried out their tasks. Sounds more like 1950’s ad men (mad men) than scholars. (It was a different time.)

There is something intellectually satisfying about the genius of scholars who, once the original team released a concordance of the material they had analyzed thus far (this concordance being a list of words they had found, with the words on either side of it and the document that it came from), devised a computer program in 1991 that used that information to reconstruct the full original texts and publish it for the world to see.

There is something that continues to draw us in, as the latest DNA technology is put to use in identifying the leather of some of the scrolls (from cows? there were no cows around there!) and possibly challenging some of the work that scholars have already done (those words, alas, did not come from the same scroll).

There is something almost magical about the very preservation of the scrolls across that vast expanse of time in such harsh conditions. David Noel Freedman, endowed Chair in Hebrew Biblical Studies at the Sailing the Dead Sea UUCSEA 07/26/09 Richards / 3 of 5

University of California notes that “the Essenes’ method of storing documents also contributed to the Scrolls’ extraordinary preservation. Many of the Scrolls were planed in clay jars that weren’t sealed, but were loosely covered. As the manuscripts deteriorated, they formed a kind of glue that sealed the jars. No one could have predicted this, and it certainly wasn’t intentional” (What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter? pg. 35). No, not intentional…but maybe almost magical.

This air of mystery and intrigue extends over into speculation about the community that preserved these scrolls. In the quotation I just read, David Noel Freedman called them “the Essenes.” It is a popular notion that the community at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, were the Essenes that were previously known only through the work of three first century C.E. historians: Pliny, who was Roman, and Josephus and Philo, Jews who became Roman citizens.

Pliny wrote that the Essenes lived in the wilderness near the shore of the Dead Sea, near the town of “En Gedi” and with “only the palm trees for company.” This almost exactly describes the location at Qumran. Josephus and Philo described the Essenes as a group of extremely pious Jews, all men, who believed that they alone were worthy to uphold the Law of Moses (The Dead Sea Scrolls by Ilene Cooper, pgs. 26 & 28).

There was initially agreement that the people at Qumran were separatists, voluntarily extracting themselves from the society to create their own community, purified of what was seen as the corrupting influences of the established religion. They did not reject Judaism; rather, they sought to practice it with what they felt was the proper, rigorous observance. They were intentionally “holier than thou,” one might say.

In keeping with that attitude--though they of course hated the Roman occupying force and imagined an apocalyptic battle against the Romans in which they would be victorious--their greatest enemies seemed to be fellow Jews who were seen to be perverting the true religion. They appear to have separated the world into two camps: “The Children of Light” (their own community) and “The Children of Darkness” (those who didn’t follow the one, true way.) They would have had no trouble talking, as President Bush did, about “evildoers,” with the one exception that they were not an imperial power but rather subjects of an imperial power. They expected the end of the world to come soon, and indeed it came for them in 70 C.E. when the Romans invaded and apparently wiped them out completely. There is the additional historical irony that if this community had not been wiped out, we would most likely not have the evidence of the scrolls today. It is guessed that the scrolls were hidden in anticipation of the Roman invasion and that if the residents of Qumran would have survived the battle they would have returned to retrieve the precious scrolls from their hiding place.

But even the temporarily settled questions, like the identification of the Qumran community with the Essenes, are increasingly being challenged as further study and speculation proceed. Nowhere do the scrolls speak of Essenes, critics of the theory point out, nor do the scrolls anywhere command celibacy, though that is noted as a trait of the Essenes by all three historians mentioned earlier. Philo says the Essenes pursued only peaceful occupations, but the “War Scroll” “gives detailed prescriptions for the conduct of a very real, though future, armed conflict against the powers of darkness”. Philo and Josephus say the Essenes rejected slavery, but “The Damascus Document” has rules governing the treatment of slaves” (pg. 25). Overall, the urge to move toward convenient and tidy identification does not match up with responsible historical research nor with present day reality. Imagine, say the editors and translators of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, trying to understand every shade of Sailing the Dead Sea UUCSEA 07/26/09 Richards / 4 of 5 religious opinion in the contemporary United States using only the categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. (Unitarian Universalism would be left out, for one thing…we wouldn’t want that!)

And if we just take the term “Protestant,” a category that could include Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and David Koresh, how much can we expect it to tell us about the individuals who fall into that description?

And so it is with most every assertion made about the Scrolls and the community from which they came: Were the scrolls written and transcribed at Qumran? There was some evidence of tables possibly used for scribal activity, but further evidence showed that hundreds of differing scribal hands were at work. If the scrolls were actually produced at Qumran, one would expect much fewer unique signatures, and many scrolls with the same scribal signature.

Was the Qumran community truly separatist? Further study and speculation suggests that they may have been much more politically astute and involved than previously thought.

Every assertion, in other words, leads to further mystery…and the great mystery for us who are not Dead Sea Scrolls scholars: if the Dead Sea Scrolls are so all-fired important, how come we don’t know what’s in them? They seem to hold the promise of explosive revelation…but have achieved that promise only in fiction.

As I searched out Netflix for Dead Sea Scrolls movies and Amazon for Dead Sea Scrolls books, the common refrain in the comments was: “This had a lot of interesting stuff about how the Scrolls were found, but didn’t tell me much about what was actually written in them.”

Let me put it this way: if the story about the scrolls reads like a thriller, the scrolls themselves decidedly do not. Reading the scrolls is more akin to trying to tune in a distant radio station--pre-satellite radio, folks—trying to tune in a distant radio station playing the news in your old car on a lonely desert road in the middle of the night. In the midst of the static, you catch about every third or fourth or fifth word, and you have to imagine the rest of the sentence. Or you listen a little further, hoping something you hear will put what you just heard in context. Reading the translation of the scrolls is reading through many sentences that are interrupted by brackets and periods and parentheses with the words that scholars think might have been there…it’s slow-going.

The arduous work of not only piecing together this unbelievably complicated jigsaw puzzle (like a jigsaw puzzle that’s been left out in the monsoons and chewed on by coyotes), but imagining the pieces that are missing and then having to translate the result, is mind-boggling. It is no wonder to me that revised interpretations are still forthcoming. Whatever we come up with, though valuable, can only be tentative.

So where does that leave us? As was said in the reading, many scholars believe that “[i]f we have perhaps transported at least most of the meaning of the words across time, space, and linguistic distance, we shall have succeeded in a principal aim.” And what meaning do we find?

Well, I shouldn’t go without saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls give the earliest versions of every book in the Hebrew Scriptures (except the Book of Esther) that have yet been discovered—earliest by approximately 1000 years. If you have a study Bible, you will probably run across footnotes that refer Sailing the Dead Sea UUCSEA 07/26/09 Richards / 5 of 5 to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars suggest that finding all of these texts points to an established canon of Scripture that predates what some may have imagined.

On the other hand, the Dead Sea Scrolls, in giving a deeper sense of the diversity of practice and interpretation in the Jewish religion of the time, also point to a more general truth about the study of history: the more we learn about any time period, the more diversity we discover. Though it is tempting to categorize in neat and tidy boxes; though we often wish to go in search of the one true source; though it would be nice to simplify our understanding and interpretation with some clear once-and-for-all answers, diversity always awaits us. I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s advice to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

And, appropriately enough, the Dead Sea Scrolls leave us with a question: what will people make of what we leave behind? What will they imagine mattered to us? How will they characterize our place in time? And what kind of legacy would we wish to linger if we could somehow pass a message, preserve a Unitarian Universalist scroll for the future?

For today, in memory of those who gave their lives in our Knoxville congregation one year ago, I think I would put the words of Frances David on my scroll: We need not think alike to love alike.

So may it be…

Welcoming LGBT Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 08/09/09

Reading From an opinion piece by Jay Michaelson in the Jewish Daily Forward, reflecting on the August 1st shooting rampage by a masked man at a Tel Aviv gay and lesbian youth centre which left two people dead and 15 wounded:

So what should we do, apart from writing checks to…gay youth organizations? Well, here are three suggestions:

First, understand that anti-gay statements and actions do cause violence. Of course, this includes the outrageous statements that issue forth from some of our religious leaders and which should not be excused by post-hoc expressions of surprise…

Second, let’s not use morality or the Bible to excuse ignorance or fear…

Finally, let’s understand that the closet itself is part of the problem. It was heartbreaking to read that family members of one victim insisted that she was “just passing by” the meeting and “only there by chance.” It was even sadder to learn that some family members of the injured have refused to visit their own children in the hospital. Can you believe it? Believe it. Now imagine what it’s like to be that child.

That’s the power of the closet. And that, alas, is why gay youth support groups remain necessary, even in 2009, and even in a comparatively tolerant country like Israel. Despite all the gains, there is still the stigma, and if I’ve learned anything in the years I’ve spent as an LGBT religious activist, it’s that, for some people, it’s always square one. So if you care about what happened in Tel Aviv, send clear, proactive messages at home that love is what matters, not the gender of your beloved.

Sermon Imagine being teased as a kid…nothing new there, right? But imagine that the kids, when they really wish to hurt one another, use the names for what you are, that these are the worst insults they can find to hurl at one another. Imagine, from an early age, having to vehemently deny, daily, who you are in order to maintain your dignity…and paradoxically having your dignity stripped away in the process.

Imagine that you hear not only children, but adults too use those names, those names meant to hurt, in jest or in judgment. Imagine that even those adults who disapprove of the jokes, who silence the others, do so with an air of embarrassment, as if to say that it is just best not to talk about people like you.

Imagine that the bullying of the childhood playground is extended to the grown-up streets and that even many people who disapprove of such targeted harassment and even violence sometimes suggest that it wouldn’t have happened if people like you had not been so “in your face.”

Imagine your gratitude at the prospect of being allowed to serve your country in the military as long as you never breathe a word about who you are. And imagine being told that if anyone has the audacity to ask, to bring up the shameful fact, you have your orders: don’t tell! Welcoming LGBT UUCSEA 08/09/09 Richards / 2 of 4

Imagine that this is the unspoken message in nearly every aspect of your life. Imagine the fear that you carry about losing your job. Imagine the fear that you carry about losing your friends. Imagine the fear that you carry about losing your church or synagogue or mosque or congregation. Imagine the fear that you carry about losing the love of your family—your own family--if you dare to say who you are.

Imagine hearing the discussions about people like you in the media. Imagine that cynical politicians and handlers use the discomfort with people like you as a wedge issue. Imagine having your relationships described—in religious terms, from the sacred texts—as an abomination. Imagine having your relationships being compared to sex with farm animals. Imagine having politician and preachers accuse you of not only personal immorality but of having an agenda to convert, to subvert, to pervert youth so that they will follow in your own twisted path. Imagine people being afraid of people like you being their doctor, their teacher, their minister…Imagine people being afraid of people like you who are afraid of people like them because fear can so easily turn to hatred and violence.

Imagine that your struggle to ensure legal recognition of a committed relationship with that person whom you love is seen as a distraction at best and a disaster at worst in the struggle for what really matters. Imagine that even supporters of your cause suggest giving your relationships a special category, a separate name, to distinguish them from “real marriages.” Imagine that each step along your way to civil rights is met with the fear of even well-intentioned people that “things are going too far.” Imagine even people you respect telling you the way things are supposed to be, the way families are supposed to look, and finding that none of this includes you.

Imagine that even many of those religious communities that open their doors to you have clauses in their welcome that accept “the sinner but not the sin.” We love you, but not who you are or what you do, they say. They offer prayers. They offer therapy. They offer cures.

Imagine that society offers to cure you of being you. Imagine the search for a gene that can be isolated, altered, eradicated, so that families can be spared the terrible trial of raising a person like you.

Wouldn’t you wonder sometimes if they were right? Imagine living with that spectrum of judgment, from disapproval to disdain to despising, from vicious verbiage to brutal violence, directed toward people like you. Imagine wondering if you should change who you are. Imagine wondering if you can change who you are. Imagine wondering if you should just do away with who you are.

Imagine—if you accept who you are; if you celebrate who you are—being told that you are obsessed with gay issues. Imagine—if you accept who you are and join in the struggle for justice and equity being told to wait. Imagine being told to wait some more. Imagine being told to wait again.

Imagine.

This all may be familiar to you. You may be gay or lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and so you didn’t have to imagine very hard. You may be heterosexual and still, of course, be very aware of the things I’ve mentioned. But being aware of it, thinking about it, is not the same as living through it, surviving it. It is not the same as seeking understanding.

Why do we embark on this Welcoming Congregation program for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender people? Welcoming LGBT UUCSEA 08/09/09 Richards / 3 of 4

Because all that I’ve mentioned continues to happen. Because religious communities play a primary role in the discrimination, injustice, harassment and violence that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community continues to face. Because we want to welcome those who are among us, those who are waiting to join us, and those who cannot yet even imagine a religious community like ours. We want our welcome to be loud enough to hear, intentional enough to be real, and specific enough to matter to a community that has grown used to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

A headline from the Associated Press on August 5th reads: “Psychologists repudiate gay-to-straight therapy.”

Addressing the treatment of gay people who find their sexual orientation in conflict with the tenets of their religious communities, Judith Glassgold, a Highland Park, N.J. psychologist who chaired the task force that rejected the efficacy of the “reparative therapy” championed by some religious groups, offered some other suggestions for people in this situation, one of them being to “find a faith that welcomes gays.”

Find a faith that welcomes gays. If only such a faith really existed! If only there was a congregation like that right here in our very own community!

Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Gail Geisenhainer, told this story in her sermon at the 2006 General Assembly in St. Louis, MO.:

I was forthrightly evangelized into Unitarian Universalism. I was 38 years old, living in Maine, driving a snow-plow for a living and feeling very sorry for myself when a friend invited me to his church. He said it was different. I rudely refused. I cursed his church. "All blank-ing churches are the same," I informed him, "they say they're open - but they don't want queer folk. To Heck with church!" My friend, persisted. He knew his church was different. He told me his church cared about people, embraced diverse families, and worked to make a better world. He assured me I could come and not have to hide any elements of who I was. So I went. Oh, I went alright.

And I dressed sooooo, carefully for my first Sunday visit. I spiked my short hair straight up into the air. I dug out my heaviest, oldest work boots, the ones with the chain saw cut that exposed the steel toe. I got my torn blue jeans and my leather jacket. There would be not a shred of ambiguity this Sunday morning. They would embrace me in my full Amazon glory, or they could fry ice. I carefully arranged my outfit so it would highlight the rock hard chip I carried on my shoulder, I bundled up every shred of pain and hurt and betrayal I had harbored from every other religious experience in my life, and I lumbered into that tiny meetinghouse on the coast of Maine.

Blue jeans and boots. Leather jacket, spiked hair and belligerent attitude. I accepted my friend's invitation and I went to his church. I expected the gray-haired ladies in the foyer to step back in fear. That would have been familiar. Instead, they stepped forward, offered me a bulletin, a newsletter and invited me to stay for coffee. It was so... odd! They never even flinched!

They called me "dear." But they pronounced it "dee-ah." "Stay for coffee, dee-ah."

I stayed for coffee. I stayed for Unitarian Universalism. Over time, the good folks of that church loved up the scattered parts of me and guided me from shattered to whole; from outcast to beloved among Welcoming LGBT UUCSEA 08/09/09 Richards / 4 of 4 many. And those folks listened to me. I and my life partner became their poster-children for the brand new Welcoming Congregation program. And they went on to provide important local pastoral and legislative ministries to gay folks in Down East Maine. We walked together and we helped each other to grow.

I thought that was such a beautiful story of our potential. And I was especially glad that the next part of her sermon began with this:

Please don't think the transition was smooth or swift. These were not imaginary super-heroes, these were human beings.

She goes on to recount some of the struggles, the hurts, the misunderstandings that made her want to run away from her new home. She recounts the decidedly unwelcoming words that were spoken during one service at Joys and Concerns, her urge to retreat into her former cynicism about all religious communities, and the thoughtful, respectful, covenantal way in which members of the congregation responded to the words of that day.

You see, becoming a Welcoming Congregation to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community is not a once-and-for-all-time endeavor. It is not just a box that we check on the Liberal Religious Certification handout. It is not about perfection (thank god!) because we are not imaginary super-heroes but human beings…it is not about perfection but purpose. Not so much a program as a process, an ongoing process that we willingly engage to provide the welcome that we wish to provide to our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender brothers and sisters who are with us, those who are waiting, and those who we have not yet given a clue that we exist!

We will engage this process by honestly sharing experiences and perceptions. We will explore hidden assumptions so that we can make conscious and conscientious choices about how we wish to be together. We will risk saying the wrong thing so that we can learn to say the compassionate thing. We will identify the boundaries of our own awareness so that we may expand those boundaries in thoughtful practice.

The Welcoming Congregation is directed toward the LGBT community (and you’ll be hearing that shorthand a lot, most likely)—it is directed there, but it is for all of us. It is an intentional expression of our covenant and mission. It is an adventure of the mind and spirit. It is a living-out of who we are and who we are called to be. And though we will meet the challenges imperfectly, we will meet them together with the confidence with which we meet all our challenges: the confidence that love will, always, guide us.

The Invention of Air Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 08/16/09

Reading From The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson: A few days before I started writing this book, a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States was asked on national television whether he believed in the theory of evolution. He shrugged off the question with a dismissive jab of humor. “It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president,” he said. “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth- grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.”

It was a funny line, but the joke only worked in a specific intellectual context. For the statement to make sense, the speaker had to share one basic assumption with his audience: that “science” was some kind of specialized intellectual field, about which political leaders needn’t know anything to do their business. Imagine a candidate dismissing a question about his foreign policy experience by saying he was running for president and not writing a textbook on international affairs. The joke wouldn’t make sense, because we assume that foreign policy expertise is a central qualification for the chief executive. But science? That’s for the guys in lab coats. That line has stayed with me since, because the web of events at the center of this book suggests that its basic assumptions are fundamentally flawed. If there is an overarching moral to this story, it is that vital fields of intellectual achievement cannot be cordoned off from one another and relegated to the specialists, that politics can and should be usefully informed by the insights of science. The protagonists of this story lived in a climate where ideas flowed easily between the realms of politics, philosophy, religion, and science. The closest thing to a hero in this book—the chemist, theologian, and political theorist Joseph Priestley—spent his whole career in the space that connects those different fields…

With Priestley, the mystery is not just that he was able to hit upon so many important ideas in such a brief time frame, it’s also that those ideas were scattered across so many different fields…There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestley alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.

Sermon Joseph Priestley did not invent air. The title of Steven Johnson’s book about Priestley refers to the original “invention of air” by the ecosystem, two billion years ago cyanobacteria concocting a metabolic strategy that envelops the planet with oxygen, that results over vast amounts of time and through a variety of events (this is the in life as we know it. Johnson marvels at the awesome link between this original invention of air and our human understanding of the process that made that invention possible and explores how it was that Joseph Priestley was positioned to see the problem of air at a time when air was not generally considered a tangible subject for investigation.

Joseph Priestley is an amazing guy, no doubt about that. I know that sounds trite, but reading about Priestley the thought kept coming to my mind, in its most sincere form: this guy is amazing! Scientific investigation, political action, religious reflection, historical research, invention, experimentation, The Invention of Air UUCSEA 08/16/09 Richards / 2 of 5 preaching, teaching, working, writing. I feel great admiration as I ponder Priestley’s life…and I also feel a great distance between us. Though he lived only a little over 200 years ago, it feels like he is a resident of a vastly different world than the one I live in. So I feel a great sense of awe and admiration…as well as distance; disconnection. But let’s start with the admiration.

Priestley is a prime example of the great potential we have as human beings.

Possibly the greatest surprise about Priestley is that he is not more well-known. He has merited only a small handful of biographies. You may not recognize his name, or only have a vague recollection of hearing it in a long ago science class. But though only a small number of books are specifically about Joseph Priestley, he does hold a prominent place in the biographies of other…well, prominent people: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams just to name a few…

Priestley is the one who, outside of many of his own accomplishments that you’ve heard about today, forever connected Benjamin Franklin to a kite and a key when he retold the story of Franklin’s experiment with electricity.

It was Joseph Priestley who offered Thomas Jefferson a way to reclaim Christianity with his book History of the Corruptions of Christianity. Jefferson wrote to John Adams that once having read Priestley’s theological writings, they provided the basis for his faith. Under attack for his liberal religious beliefs just after becoming President in 1801, Jefferson said with reference to the title of Priestley’s book: “To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself…I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believing he never claimed any other.” This was Priestley’s version of Unitarian Christianity shining through his words.

And Priestley had an important, if little known, influence on the very ideas that propelled the American Revolution, opposing British oppression of the colonies when he lived in England and opposing an early attack on civil liberties in the newly formed United States. Writer Steven Johnson points out that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In those letters, Benjamin Franklin is mentioned five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton two times, and Joseph Priestley fifty-two times.

And, I cannot neglect to mention, though his is not one of the first names you hear about in Unitarian history, that Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian minister, instrumental in the beginnings of Unitarianism in both Britain and the United States. We have a Joseph Priestley District in the Unitarian Universalist Association (serving 67 congregations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Northern Virginia, and the District of Columbia), and you will find numerous congregations that have named themselves in his honor.

And in a way, it is quite fitting that Priestley appears, not as superstar, but supporting actor--backup singer, if you will—in so many stories because he was a passionate, generous, creative collaborator throughout his life.

He met Benjamin Franklin through a group called The Honest Whigs that Franklin helped found. This group of freethinkers met at a London coffeehouse in St. Paul’s churchyard and engaged in long rambling sessions on the ramifications of new scientific ideas in caffeinated community. The Invention of Air UUCSEA 08/16/09 Richards / 3 of 5

He later became a member of another group devoted to sharing the fruits of their scientific investigations, The Lunar Society, which included (as mentioned before) Charles Darwin’s grandfathers Erasmus Darwin, an evolutionary theorist in his own right, and Josiah Wedgwood of ceramic ware fame, as well as toymaker Matthew Boulton and James Watt, inventor of the steam engine. This group grew so enamored with Priestley’s capabilities that they ended up funding Priestley’s scientific work…though they didn’t publicize the arrangement, as Priestley had already become known as a political and religious radical. One of their big challenges with Priestley, who was so used to sharing all of his investigations as widely as possible, was to get him to restrict his sharing of some of those findings, especially the ones that they could use in their businesses, to the Lunar Society.

Joseph Priestley was devoted, in all his endeavors, to free inquiry. That was the way to find out about things; you had to try new things and ask new questions until you found the question that was relevant and the answer that made a difference, that gave a new foundation from which to begin asking questions that one would have never known to ask unless you had been free to ask the first questions. He was not constrained by supposed barriers between different fields of enquiry because his curiosity ranged across them freely, unaware of any barriers. A scientific theory could have religious implications, just as a theological conclusion could have political consequences.

His collaborative method arose from that same devotion: the way to find out about things was to tell what you knew (or what you thought you knew) and to listen to what other people had found (or thought they had found) and to see if the meeting of those insights, conclusions, opinions might inspire the participants in the exchange to a new revelation.

The optimism--incurable optimism some said—that stayed with him throughout his life is what propelled this devotion. So enamored was he with the particularities of life, in all its forms, that each discovery led to more exciting questions that he wished to explore. And more than that, he believed deeply that the answers would matter. Fully immersed in the ethos of the Enlightenment, he fully expected that greater knowledge and understanding would lead to governments that were more just, religions that were more reasonable, technological advances that would benefit all humankind.

Priestley defended the opening of the first Unitarian church in England by invoking the same principles that governed his scientific research and with the same amount of unquenchable hope for the future: “The only method of attaining to a truly valuable agreement is to promote the most perfect freedom of thinking and acting…in order that every point of difference may have an opportunity of being fully canvassed, not doubting but that Truth will prevail, and that then a rational, firm, and truly valuable union will take place.”

And I respect and admire that faith in free enquiry; I envy it. But, sadly enough, it may be Priestley’s optimism that makes him seem so distant. My cynical, 21st century self says, “Oh, Joe, easy for you to say! There you were smack dab in the middle of the Enlightenment. You lived in a world where amateur scientists like yourself could shift whole paradigms with your discoveries. You lived in a world where a bunch of radicals could sit around in a coffee shop talking about changing the world…and then go do it! You lived in a world where ministers—and I still can’t figure this one out—where ministers had time to also be brilliant chemists, thoughtful theologians, prolific writers, and political activists. You lived in a world where it still seemed like knowledge could improve our lives; where it still felt like progress was real; where the future seemed brighter than the past. Oh, Joe, easy for you to say!”

The Invention of Air UUCSEA 08/16/09 Richards / 4 of 5

My cynical self imagined how sadly out of place Joseph Priestley would be in my world; imagined how his optimism would wither under the brutal light of present-day realities and brutalities. What was easy for him to believe then would be nearly impossible for him to believe now, said my cynical self.

But my thoughtful self responded. (I’m sorry if I scare you, but these conversations with my selves go on all the time.) My thoughtful self responded, “Take another look at his life. Was it really so easy for Joseph Priestley to retain that faith and optimism?”

In a sermon in 1785 that was subsequently published as a pamphlet called The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry, Priestley said, “We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.”

This was powerfully provocative language from the pulpit, especially in a country that did not even pretend to a separation between church and state. For this, and other statements and public positions, Priestley was identified as a dangerous troublemaker and given the nickname, “Gunpowder Joe.” When conservative elites managed to incite a mob—and mobs were incited back then just the way they are incited now, with manufactured fear and a clear target for the ensuing anxiety and anger—when they managed to incite a mob of working-class men who called themselves the “Church and King” movement, it is no surprise that they went after Priestley, eventually burning down his house, his laboratory and his church.

So maybe it wasn’t so easy for Joseph Priestley to remain optimistic…

In his “Letter to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, Following the Riots of 14 July 1791,” Priestley mourned the destruction of “truly valuable and useful apparatus of philosophical instruments” that he had used, not for profit, “but only in the advancement of science, for the benefit of my country and of mankind.” He ended with this pointed observation: “We are better instructed in the mild and forbearing spirit of Christianity than ever to think of recourse to violence—and can you think that such conduct as yours [offers] any recommendation of your religious principles in preference to ours?”

Priestley immigrated to America after this incident and was welcomed at first as a dignitary, honored for his support of the American Revolution and for devoting “his life to the sacred duty of diffusing knowledge and happiness among nations.”

This did not protect him, however, from having to handle a fractured real estate deal and, much more devastating, having to cope with the personal tragedy of the death of his son and wife over the next few years.

So maybe it wasn’t so easy for Joseph Priestley to remain optimistic…

Further, the welcome provided by his new country didn’t last. Though John Adams attended some of Priestley’s first sermons at the Unitarian church in Philadelphia, it became increasingly awkward to be associated with a minister that was known for heretical and provocative statements…especially when Adams was in the midst of a Presidential campaign. (Does that sound at all familiar?)

The Invention of Air UUCSEA 08/16/09 Richards / 5 of 5

And after Adams became President and instituted the Alien and Sedition Laws, authorizing the state to deport any noncitizen “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” and to arrest anyone who published “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government, Priestley could not remain silent. Writing to an administration official, he said, “It is clear to me that you have violated your constitution in several essential articles, and act upon maxims by which you may defeat the whole object of it.” Suddenly, the country that had welcomed him as a staunch supporter now viewed him as a dangerous radical and he himself was in danger of deportation.

And if the American Revolution that Priestley had supported was proving to be a disappointment, so was the French Revolution, which at one time seemed to hold so much promise. The French government had gone so far as to execute Priestley’s scientific colleage, Lavoisier, some years before.

So maybe it wasn’t so easy for Joseph Priestley to remain optimistic…and maybe I don’t feel as distant, as disconnected from his world as I first thought. It wasn’t that his optimism was never challenged; it was just never defeated. It wasn’t that he was never faced with the dark sides of human nature--the irrational fear, the hypocrisy, the corruptions, the violence—it was that he never let that eclipse his vision of the light. It wasn’t that he never experienced life’s “no,” it was that he always found a way to answer “yes” to life.

If I find Priestley’s optimism misplaced in my world, maybe the fault is not with Priestley but with me. If I could rekindle Priestley’s faith in this place and time might I feel empowered to make his dreams for a better world a reality? Priestley’s faith was not based on pleasant circumstances, but a deeper current that runs through all places and times, that runs from the invention of air to the discovery of the process, that runs beneath tragedy just as it gushes forth in joy. We, here, in this Unitarian Universalist congregation are committed to tapping that current so that when we affirm our principles, when we speak our mission, when we work toward justice, we can sing together, with all conviction, “These things shall be.”

The Qur’an Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 08/23/09

Opening Words – (#609 Saadi, Responsive Reading) To worship God is nothing other than to serve the people. It does not need rosaries, prayer carpets, or robes. All peoples are member of the same body, created from one essence. If fate brings suffering to one member The others cannot stay at rest.

Readings 1. From The Koran: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Cook: It is in the nature of a scripture or a classic to be two things at once. On the one hand, it is a product of its own time. Indeed, it is precisely this temporal distance that calls forth the elaborate pattern of scholastic activity that comes to surround such a text - the efforts to preserve its original wording, explain its obscurities, interpret its meaning, and so forth.

And on the other hand, it has authority in our time. Were it to lose this authority, it would no longer be a scripture or a classic, just a text of interest to people who are curious about the past. Being these two things at once is a tense assignment…

2. From The Qur’an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence: There will be more headline stories about the Qur’an. Though they will likely concern its abuse rather than its use, it is its use that will finally matter most in the decades and centuries ahead. Scholars will continue to debate its style and content, its medieval and modern interpretations, and also its application in law and politics as well as interfaith dialogue. Muslim intellectuals will strive to understand it within the range of their own experience and reflection, whether as traditionalists or feminists, Islamists or modernists, trained or self-taught scholars. Each could be queried for her or his approach to the text, but what they all share needs to be restated: Muhammad was the Prophet of God…and the Qur’an as now received, recited and read remains the Word of God for all time. Beyond these common assumptions they have enormous differences.

3. From The Qur’an, translated by Bruce Lawrence: Even if the ocean were ink For writing the words of my Lord, The ocean would be exhausted Before the words of my Lord were exhausted, Even if We were to add another ocean to it.

Sermon The Muslim celebration of Ramadan began yesterday. Muslims around the world participate in this celebration by fasting during the daylight hours; engaging in charitable giving and volunteer work to help people in need; seeking forgiveness for wrongs they have done and making plans for personal improvement over the coming year; renewing their commitments to practices of prayer and reflection…and by reading the Qur’an. The Qur’an UUCSEA 08/23/09 Richards / 2 of 5

As Ramadan commemorates the first verses of the Qur’an being revealed to Muhammad, Muslims are encouraged to read the Qur’an in its entirety during Ramadan and I—though I am not Muslim—thought that I might take part in the celebration as a respectful outsider by reading the Qur’an, too. After all, I am passionately interested in religions…and I love to read…and I’ve yet to work up the necessary discipline for fasting.

So I set about reading the Qur’an…yes, well, reading the Qur’an turns out to be a formidable task. One of the first things you learn about the Qur’an is that a Qur’an in translation is not the real Qur’an. To really understand it, one must read it in Arabic. Further, the Arabic of the Qur’an is not the Arabic that is spoken today, that one would learn in a language class, so that even Muslims who speak Arabic also learn Qur’anic Arabic in their study of their Scripture. And, it is sometimes said that the very act of transcribing the words of the Qur’an to writing is an act of translation in itself, as the Qur’an, in its purest form, is recited. It is meant to be spoken and heard. The oral Qur’an is the real Qur’an.

So right away, as a mono-linguistic English-speaking non-Muslim who wishes to read the Qur’an, I am about four steps removed from what is considered, in its purest form, the Qur’an. Author Bruce Lawrence encourages me, if somewhat halfheartedly, writing, “Distance from the source handicaps us, yet we can still learn about Islam by engaging with the Qur’an, even as a written text, translated from Arabic to English” (The Qur’an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence, pg. 8). So it seems that the quest for some measure of understanding is still a worthy journey, and one that I, though ill-fitted for the task, can still engage.

But if reading the Qur’an is a formidable task, it is also something of a forbidding task. If it’s true that the Qur’an seems very distant for many of us non-Muslim Westerners from our culture and experience, it is also true that it is as close to us as our newspaper, our television, our computer. The Qur’an, for all of its seeming impenetrability, has penetrated the various devices that bring us our news, with talk of jihad, of veiled women, of female genital mutilation, of Shiites and Sunnis, of Shari’ah, of Madrassahs…Didn’t all of these things arise from the Qur’an? And if that is so, isn’t it a good thing that the Qur’an is distant from us?

Let me say, first of all, that much of what we may expect to find in the Qur’an is not there.

For instance: if we want to read the story of Moses, it’s in the Torah. If we want to read the story of Jesus, we turn to the Gospels. If we want to read the story of Muhammad, we read…No, not the Qur’an.

Now it is commonly understood that the words of the Qur’an were revealed directly to Muhammad, and so many passages are understood in the context his life, but if you want the biography of Muhammad you must go outside the Qur’an to what is known as the Hadith, traditions and reports about the Prophet that were joined with the Qur’an as complementary texts.

As for veiled women and genital cutting--and I use this term purposefully instead of the euphemistic “female circumcision”—veiling and genital cutting are cultural practices that predate Islam. The Qur’anic justification for veiling women apparently hinges on a verse that calls for the modesty of both men and women and tangentially refers to a veil (with no specific instructions), while genital cutting has no justification within the Qur’an at all and is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims. (This is not to say that it is not practiced by Muslims, in Somalia for example, and they justify it as part of Islam).

The Qur’an UUCSEA 08/23/09 Richards / 3 of 5

What about jihad, holy war? It is mentioned in the Qur’an, but there is much debate on just what it means, with some scholars saying that Muhammad spoke of “the greater jihad” as the moral struggle with oneself.

The Sunnis and the Shiites split off from one another after the Qur’an and so are, of course, not mentioned within it, just as you don’t have references to Lutherans or Catholics within the New Testament.

The point is: what we hear about and learn to associate with the Qur’an is made up of an almost impenetrable mixture of isolated facts, half-truths, mistakes, misinformation, and lies…it is no wonder we find the prospect of reading it forbidding. It is no wonder that we feel no connection to this tradition. It is no wonder that we might lose impetus for the whole project. How might we connect with what seems so foreign? Why would we try?

Well, recent estimates of the percentage of people in the world who identify as Muslims range from 20% to 25% of the total population. Not an insignificant number. And though Islam is a diverse religion--as one might expect from a religion that includes so many people and that covers the wide variety of countries and cultures that it does--we can say with some assurance that the Qur’an lies at the heart of all of these forms of Islam. There is a practical reason to learn something about the Qur’an, and that is to know more about the world in which we live and the spiritual practices of our neighbors.

But lest we undertake this as an anthropological project, observing from a distance the workings of another culture, we might also look to our connections.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have an important historical connection to Islam dating from our Unitarian roots in the Transylvania of the 16th century. It was only because of the protection and support of the Islamic ruler of neighboring Turkey that Queen Isabella and King John Sigismund were able to rule Transylvania and to enact the very first Edict of Religious Toleration, allowing Lutherans and Catholics and Calvinists and Unitarians to practice their religion freely, a circumstance unheard of at the time in Christian Europe. The Sultan of Turkey had his own geopolitical reasons for such support, but was also drawing from a tradition in Islam that practiced tolerance of differing faiths. Though tolerance is often overshadowed in modern Islam by the antics and atrocities of fundamentalists, it does present itself throughout the history. The Qur’an itself says, “No compulsion is there in religion.”

Another possible connection for some of you…one word: Rumi. How many of you know Rumi? Rumi is, by some accounts, THE bestselling poet in the United States. I know that some folks in this congregation have told me that he is one of their favorite authors. Now Rumi was a Sufi, and Sufism has a very Universalist flavor, so readers of Rumi can forget or never realize that Sufism is an Islamic mystical tradition. But it is one thing to revel in the way Rumi opens his arms to the world, writing “I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian, and I am not even a Muslim,” but it would be irresponsible scholarship not to recognize that he grew into that recognition from the fertile soil of The Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad.

Also, Islam shares with Unitarian Universalism a deep respect for knowledge. Writer, broadcaster, and critical commentator on Islam, Ziauddin Sardar, writes, “The Qur’an constantly asks questions – have you not looked around you and studied the cosmos, have you not looked into the history of other nations, have you not traveled on the earth to explore its flora and fauna? – and urges the believers to engage with the material world” (What Do Muslims Believe? pg. 48). The aforementioned Rumi wrote, The Qur’an UUCSEA 08/23/09 Richards / 4 of 5

“Ignorance is God’s prison; knowing is God’s palace.” The Prophet Muhammad said, “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” We share that. There is power in learning, in teaching, in understanding and asking more questions and expanding ever wider and ever deeper that ocean of awe.

And there are others, I’m sure. Connections. Points of commonality. Opportunities for solidarity.

But, listen, I don’t want to sugarcoat this. Islam is not gentle and mild in all of its manifestations. Cruel, senseless, intolerant things are happening in the name of Islam which we must face. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose autobiography is called Infidel, recounts many of these atrocities from the crystal clear lens of her own personal experience:

“I first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia,” she writes. “In Saudi Arabia, every breath, every step we took, was infused with the concepts of purity or sinning, and with fear. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago. The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and values.”

Wishful thinking cannot interpret away reality. That is precisely why I think that we need to connect with those elements of peace, justice, and tolerance in Islam. We have to find tangible ways to support the many Muslims who reject violent and unjust practices. And we need to ask ourselves how we, as a nation, are supporting those unacceptable interpretations of Islam that we are so quick to judge.

Who was it--in the 1980s Afghanistan struggle against the Soviet Union—who was it who supported the efforts and ideology of one Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen, which would later splinter and morph into the Taliban? Who supported them? The CIA, the Carter Administration, the Reagan Administration…

What about the recent allegations that Erik Prince--the director of Blackwater, a private military company funded through our tax dollars—that Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life"?

What about Guantanamo? Abu Ghraib? What about the flat-out justification of torture? What about the ongoing drone strikes in Pakistan?

Are the atrocities of our enlightened society less important because they occur in distant places? Because we don’t claim to support them? How are we feeding into the paranoia, fear, and anger that helps to subvert and pervert Islam into the very thing we fear the most?

And if we can stop fueling the most dangerous interpretations of the Qur’an, we can begin to encourage, support, and respect the most positively tranformative interpretations. I don’t believe in wishful thinking…but I do believe in thinking. The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr and can often be more powerful.

There are scholars doing important historical critical work on the Qur’an right now that could open new as well as re-newed interpretations. Religions are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting their source The Qur’an UUCSEA 08/23/09 Richards / 5 of 5 documents, as are philosophers and ethicists and citizens and leaders. It happens with the Torah, and the Gospels, and the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and our Principles and Sources and Purposes…and it is happening with the Qur’an. In an article on Koran study and research from The Atlantic Magazine of January 1999, Toby Lester notes that Islam’s own history shows that the prevailing conception of the Koran is not the only one to have ever existed. The very idea that the Qur’an is the literal and matchless Word of God did not become orthodoxy until the tenth century.

What does all this matter? It opens doors. “What a re-examination of Islamic history offers Muslims,” says Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, “is an opportunity to challenge the Muslim orthodoxy from within, rather than having to rely on ‘hostile’ outside sources.” The scholars look forward to an Islamic renaissance.

And, of course, there are Muslim Unitarian Universalists, just as there are Unitarian Universalists from a variety of other religious, ethical, and earth-based traditions. That is as it should be. Dividing us into groups sometimes makes it easier to talk about and define things, but the vision we hold together is one of unity.

The author of our opening words was a Muslim from the 13th century, and happened to be a favorite of a prominent figure in our own tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The words that we read earlier also appear, in a slightly different format, above the entrance to the Hall of Nations in the United Nations Building in New York.

All peoples are member of the same body, created from one essence. If fate brings suffering to one member The others cannot stay at rest.

The Qur’an says:

"O humanity! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

So that we may know one another…

So may it be.

Closing Words (#610, Mohammed Iqbal, adapted) The journey of love is a very long journey. But sometimes with a sigh we can cross that vast desert. Search and search again without losing hope. We may find sometime a treasure on our way. Our hearts and our eyes are all devoted to the vision.

Covenant Groups Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 09/20/09

Opening Words – (#418, adapted from Israel Zangwill) Come into the circle of love and justice. Come into the community of mercy, holiness and health. Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Readings 1. From “Sitting in Circles,” an excerpt from A Hidden Wholeness by teacher, writer, activist, Parker Palmer: The circles of trust…are a rare form of community--one that supports rather than supplants the individual quest for integrity-that is rooted in two basic beliefs. First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader. Second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice…

Occasionally, I hear people say, "The world is such a confusing place that I can find clarity only by going within." Well I, for one, find it at least as confusing "in here" as it is "out there"--usually more so!-and I think most people do. If we get lost in New York City, we can buy a map, ask a local, or find a cabbie who knows the way. The only guidance we can get on the inner journey comes through relationships in which others help us discern our leadings.

But the kind of community I learned about…does not presume to do that discernment for us, as communities sometimes do: "You tell us your version of truth, and we will tell you whether you are right or wrong!" Instead, a circle of trust holds us in a space where we can make our own discernments, in our own way and time, in the encouraging and challenging presence of other people.

2. From “Engagement Groups: Bringing Forth the Future from the Past,” by Thandeka: Small Group Ministries engender pious feelings; they heal the human heart. This healing power is an act of right relationship. Our heart is healed through right relationship with others. Our heart was not broken alone. It cannot be healed alone. Salvation is not a solo act. To live in sacramental time means to live in right relationship with others and with the natural world. The redemptive power of our religious movement is the sacramental act of right relationship. This power is not a creedal belief but a way of life. We know it because we live it. We create redemptive power here and now in the world, among us, between us, through us. These feelings, when held by an organization structure that supports and encourages its congregants to care for each other, are the power that can recreate and revitalize our liberal religious movement anew.

Sermon How often in your daily lives do you feel that what you say is being heard; that someone is truly listening to you. How often do you make the time—the space—to truly listen to others?

Now granted, for myself, I know that a lot of things that I say may not be worth anyone’s commitment to deep listening. Though the human capacity for communication is mind-boggling, it is often put to use toward mundane tasks and shallow ends. It is rarely pointed toward increasing understanding, but rather Covenant Groups UUCSEA 09/20/09 Richards / 2 of 5 toward social niceties, the exchange of requests and replies, the transfer of information, persuasion, complaints, and manipulation. Because of the barrage of communication that surrounds us, and because it is apt to be intended toward one or more of these various uses, we have developed filters that serve to quickly identify and classify communications. In what I imagine to be an auditory version of speed reading, we listen for key words, assess the context of the communication, and decide on a response within a fairly short time.

Now listen, this is a useful skill. I don’t mean to in any way denigrate any of these purposes of communication necessarily, nor the type of hearing that we’ve developed to receive it.

The mundane, however we may feel about it, must be addressed. Social niceties serve to increase social cohesion. (Remember, I come from the land of Minnesota Nice.) It is important that we make our needs and desires known; it is a great skill to learn how to persuade others to our point of view; complaints sometimes result in improvements, or at least serve to let off steam; the transfer of information is vital to almost every human activity; and manipulation, as much as we want to divorce ourselves from it, is probably as natural a human inclination as compassion. (Right, parents? How do we get these kids to do what we ask?? Right, kids? How do we get these parents to do what we want??)

There is nothing wrong with any of that…necessarily. Except that, in a consumer culture such as our own, we can sometimes receive even the most sincere of communications with suspicion. “What’s he selling?” we say to ourselves as we hear the passion rise in a person’s voice. “What does she want from me?” we ask as we hear someone voice their sorrow. “I don’t know what to say,” we think, as if our perfect words were what was called for. How often do you find yourself jumping from assessing the person to assuming the content of the communication to fashioning a response or worrying about not having a ready response…all while the other person is still talking, maybe still on their first sentence?

There is not necessarily a problem with our auditory filter—you can display your Evelyn Woodhead speed-hearing diploma proudly—except that we never seem to know when to turn off the filter. We’ve been listening quickly for so long, that we no longer know how to listen deeply. The filter does not work when we are coming together to communicate from our hearts; from our experiences; from our uniquely individual selves.

We will be inviting you to sign up for covenant groups this next month (October). In groups of approximately 6-8 people, we will be meeting in our groups twice a month, if possible, to speak and be heard, and to listen—truly listen—to one another.

Some of the details will be worked out in the individual groups, but the general format will be a welcome into your circle. This might be a lighting of the chalice, a brief time of silence and centering, a reading, or a ritual of your choice. Something that marks the beginning of a time set aside for the sharing of experience, emotion, and responses to a particular theme.

The themes may be a single word or phrase. Honor. Faith. Loss. Success. They will be open and expansive enough to invite you to reflect and respond from your own experience, with anything that this word evokes for you. The facilitator of the group will also have questions that relate to the theme if it feels a little too vague and you seek a little more specificity to inspire your response.

Participants will share within a predetermined time frame without interruption. When another person is speaking, your only task is to listen. When you are speaking, the other participants are hearing you. Covenant Groups UUCSEA 09/20/09 Richards / 3 of 5

The groups will close with some form of acknowledgment of the sharing, possibly a ritual closing, reading, or quiet, a thank you to participants, and details about the next meeting.

Simple, right?

One of the things that covenant groups will do is let us practice listening without the filter. Let us practice deep listening, as Parker Palmer might say. Active listening, as writer and activist, Frances Moore Lappe might say. And please…don’t beat yourself up if you find the filter stubbornly refusing to budge. If you find that you’ve assumed that you know what someone is going to say and are already jumping ahead to what they will say next, or what they should say next…If you are already fashioning your wise response, or remembering you similar experience, or find that you have wandered completely outside the moment to concerns from other areas of your life…If you find yourself returning to the moment and not knowing where the heck you’ve been, only that you’ve missed what someone is saying…Don’t beat yourself up; but don’t interrupt, either. Don’t give up. Just call yourself back to the moment and invite yourself once again into deeper, active listening and know that you will have more precious and rare opportunities to practice listening.

And besides listening—a supremely important skill that is sadly lacking in our world at large—besides listening, covenant groups will encourage you to speak. Now you might be thinking that most Unitarian Universalists don’t seem to need any help in talking…we’re doing just fine, thank you. But just as the culture encourages and inspires a particular type of filtered listening, we are also encouraged to develop a particular type of filtered speaking. We speak of trivialities; we voice our opinions; we assess and assume; we analyze and intellectualize; we quote and quip and question; but when do we just speak honestly, seeking neither approval nor agreement, but simply sharing from our experience?

There are places for all those other forms of speaking, but what about speaking from our hearts? We have ripped that from our daily lives and relegated it rather ashamedly to the antiseptic office of the therapist or the private meeting with the clergy or the last-ditch encounter with the counselor, but doesn’t it belong in community? Shouldn’t we find space for our reflective selves in our everyday life rather than waiting for crisis to reveal ourselves to ourselves? Don’t we owe it to ourselves and to one another to create what Parker Palmer calls “circles of trust” that make space for our honest reflections, remembrances, the restoration of that which makes us who we are?

We quickly find that the practice of listening begins with listening to ourselves. We have neglected our inner voices, just as we have ignored the voices of one another. And I don’t mean the inner voice that is constantly reminding you of your to-do list. I don’t mean the inner voice that is full of criticism of your every move; that causes you to worry about what other people think; that carries the voices of society, or the church, or your neighbors, or peer pressure, or societal norms, or media messages…I mean the voice that lies beneath all the chatter of our daily lives. The voice that holds promise…and some fear. The inner voice that requires effort and patience and commitment to hear. The voice that Parker Palmer says can teach us if we are ready to learn.

I loved this passage from the reading:

Occasionally, I hear people say, "The world is such a confusing place that I can find clarity only by going within." Well I, for one, find it at least as confusing "in here" as it is "out there"--usually more so!-and I think most people do. If we get lost in New York City, we can buy a map, ask a local, or find a Covenant Groups UUCSEA 09/20/09 Richards / 4 of 5 cabbie who knows the way. The only guidance we can get on the inner journey comes through relationships in which others help us discern our leadings.

But the kind of community I learned about…does not presume to do that discernment for us, as communities sometimes do: "You tell us your version of truth, and we will tell you whether you are right or wrong!" Instead, a circle of trust holds us in a space where we can make our own discernments, in our own way and time, in the encouraging and challenging presence of other people.

Now let me be clear: covenant groups are not therapy. And while I hope that covenant groups will encourage personal discernment, I want to say--as Palmer said of the circles of trust--the community, the other participants in the covenant group, are not offering to do that discernment for you. If you’re looking for advice, a covenant group is not the place. But seriously, how many of us are looking for advice? How many of us say to ourselves: “If only I could find a wise person in this congregation who could tell me what to do…Boy, that would be great!” Rather, what I hear from people is that they come here seeking community.

So covenant groups are not therapy.

Covenant groups are not discussion groups. It is neither analysis nor opinion that we are after, but a response from your own experience. We are asking participants to draw from a different source than one uses to debate or discuss issues, one that does not call for explanation or justification. And we also ask participants to engage a type of listening that is free from the anxiety of needing to respond.

Covenant groups are not affinity groups. There will be no “bicyclists’ covenant group” or “anarchists’ covenant group.” Affinity groups are great, and I encourage you to start one as you are moved to do so, but I would ask that we don’t confuse them with covenant groups. This allows a greater potential for people to come together in covenant groups without necessitating shared interest or orientation.

Covenant groups are not circle suppers; circle suppers are wonderfully informal and allow conversation to go where it will in strengthening our relationships with one another. Covenant groups are, once again, intentional in how they are structured and what we are asking you to share.

Covenant groups, to me, are a way to actualize the promise of our community. Our promise to honor and care for each other—made explicit in our covenant--is embodied in our commitment to speak honestly and to listen intentionally. It is what we practice.

And covenant groups allow us to practice. I have heard that listening—deep and active listening—is an art, and every art form that I know of requires practice. But here’s the good news; unlike some other art forms, I believe that every single individual has the capability to excel at this art form. It takes work; it takes focus; it takes practice; but we are all capable. And listening to one another, and having the courage to speak openly to one another, and committing to providing the space in which trust grows between one another is an endeavor that can only deepen our covenant with one another and strengthen our mission in the world.

Sam Tanenhaus, writer and editor of The New York Times Book Review, said this on Bill Moyers Journal this last Friday:

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The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side.

Frances Moore Lappe has placed active listening as the first of ten “arts of democracy.”

There is little doubt that the practice of listening leads to understanding, and that understanding leads to stronger community, and that stronger community leads to the type of active involvement, negotiation, compromise, and coalitions that bring positive change.

There is a big picture…but I don’t want us to rush too fast to the big picture and lose the focus on where we are beginning.

I’m sure that you are full of questions…I hope that you are. More details will be forthcoming at our introduction of and sign-up for Covenant Groups. Feel free to talk to me or Lorraine Groberg or the facilitator of your group as we go along. We welcome feedback; we encourage commitment; and we look forward to deepening our relationships with one another.

UU minister and writer, Thandeka writes of the healing power created in covenant groups as an act of right relationship.

Our heart is healed through right relationship with others…This power is not a creedal belief but a way of life. We know it because we live it. These feelings, when held by an organizational structure that supports and encourages its congregants to care for each other, are the power that can recreate and revitalize our liberal religious movement anew.

So may it be.

Closing Words (#694, Frederick E. Gillis) May the Love which overcomes all differences, which heals all wounds, which puts to flight all fears, which reconciles all who are separated, be in us and among us now and always.

Hunger Pangs Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 10/11/09

Readings 1. From a September 14, 2009 Association of Arizona Food Banks press release: Survey results just released by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief charity, along with newly released Census data on 2008 poverty, income and health insurance data combine to paint a stark picture of poverty and hunger in Arizona.

The Census data shows a striking 16.1% of Arizonans lived in poverty over 2007-08, compared to 13.2% in 2000-01. This seven-year change is a historically significant increase for Arizona, culminating in 1,172,000 people living in poverty. During that same time period, median household income in Arizona dropped 6% from $50,839 to $47,942, compared to only a 3.6% dip nationwide. In 2009, federal poverty guidelines are set at an annual gross income of $22,050 for a family of four…

In Arizona, food banks distributed 42.2% more food in the first two quarters of 2009 versus 2008 while also seeing demand for emergency food boxes, a 3-5 day supply of food for a family of four, increase by 23.2%. Some food banks have reduced the frequency of emergency food box distribution so that newcomers aren’t turned away…

More than half (56%) of the country’s food banks reported that they are seeing more children as clients. One in five Arizona children struggle with hunger, which is the sixth highest rate in the country.

2. From a July 3, 2009 transcript of Bill Moyers’ Journal: In Philadelphia, Bill Clark, who runs the largest food bank there, told The Inquirer that many new people are coming "terrorized," "in shock," "embarrassed" to be asking for a handout.

Meanwhile, it was reported last week that our government will spend 835 billion dollars this year on the economic bailout. The masters of finance who brought on this disaster seem not a whit embarrassed at handouts of such magnitude.

The only counter to such unrepentant avarice is public opinion fired by moral conviction…Many issues divide our religious traditions. But suppose they came together on this one cause, to put right what's wrong with a system where people must turn to charity because they can't count on justice.

Sermon Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, says this in one of his standup routines:

On my block, a lot of people walk their dogs and I always see them walking along with their little poop bags. This, to me, is the lowest activity in human life. Following a dog with a little pooper scooper. Waiting for him to go so you can walk down the street with it in your bag. If aliens are watching this through telescopes, they’re going to think the dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them is making a poop, the other one’s carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge?

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Who would you assume is in charge? If you were not enmeshed in the activity, did not treat it as normal, everyday routine, how strange it would look! What I loved about this joke is that it led me to reflect on what we take for granted; it caused me to think about how funny many of our normal activities would look from the alien perspective.

Sometimes funny…sometimes tragically incomprehensible.

For example:

18,418 people died of hunger on this planet on Friday as of 3:30 PM Mountain Standard Time. At 3:31 PM, that number climbed to 18,445, with an additional person dying almost every two seconds. That made 8,030,355 people who died of hunger this year.

“How can this be?” our space visitor asks. “Is there not enough food?”

Oh, no…there’s plenty of food. In fact, Americans waste daily about 5 times the amount (in tons) that is provided in total global food aid, and they spend 20 times the amount for that wasted food than the amount that is distributed globally to feed hungry people (from midday figures on 10/09/2009).

The aliens are puzzled. So are some earthlings.

How do we explain this?

The United Nations reported in 2007 that one third of the global food aid budget, or some $600 million annually, is wasted due to conditions tying it to processing and shipping by national carriers of donor countries.

A 2004 study conducted by anthropologist Timothy Jones for the University of Arizona indicates that a shocking forty to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. Nationwide, he says, household food waste alone adds up to $43 billion.

Whatever reason we may give for the staggering number of people that go hungry in this world, it is not about a lack of food.

By an accident of birth, I have never experienced hunger…not real hunger. I was born into a middle class family in the United States of America. I have been hungry, yes. I have skipped meals, sometimes more than one. I have fasted voluntarily. I have lived on a very lean and inexpensive diet when money was tight. But I have never experienced hunger. I always knew that food was in my future. If I had to go without food temporarily, it was with the assurance that it wouldn’t be for long. Part of the devastation of hunger is the fear of not knowing when it will end.

When I first heard that the government had replaced the word “hunger” with the term “food insecurity,” I considered it a shameful euphemism, but I have come to believe that this is a descriptive designation. Food insecurity refers to the lack of access to enough food to fully meet basic needs at all times due to lack of financial resources. Food insecurity does not magically disappear with a meal; the uncertainty lingers about when the next meal will come and where it will come from; the uncertainty lingers about obtaining the proper vitamins and nutrients; the uncertainty lingers about the prospects for employment (and remember just as unemployment can lead to hunger, hunger can lead to unemployment as it strips Hunger Pangs UUCSEA 10/11/09 Richards / 3 of 5 away our potential to think clearly and act effectively); the uncertainty lingers about navigating the maze of government regulations or obtaining the proper paperwork. Hunger is a state of being; it is not something that disappears with a meal, but only with the assurance that one will be able to secure regular meals (and will not have to sacrifice healthcare or housing to do it). Hunger, in this country, is deep insecurity in the midst of flagrant, unconscionable excess.

My uncle is a Lutheran minister. He and the youth pastor at his congregation wanted to involve the youth group in a project to assist the local food banks, but thought that first they should give the kids the barest taste of what it means to be truly poor in this country, to have to go hungry. They decided they would have a sleepover in a house owned by the church; after gathering on Friday evening, the youth would have nothing to eat until after the service on Sunday. (They could have water, and they were prepared for any medical emergencies that might arise.)

Friday night flew by pretty quickly. The youth missed food, they said, but mostly out of habit; they usually had stuff to eat as they were watching movies or playing cards or just hanging out.

Saturday morning was a little rougher, as they woke to no breakfast and had to face the prospect of a whole day without food. As the day wore on, they tried to keep busy with activities, but often one or another of them would stop to speak to my uncle or the youth pastor.

“This is really hard,” one said. “I never really knew what it was like to be poor… to not have anything to eat. I can’t wait for Sunday morning.”

“So you think you have a better idea of what it’s like to be poor?” my uncle asked the group later on.

They all nodded vigorously.

He then asked the youth pastor to run an errand for him. The kids looked a little confused. “Where’s he going?”

“Oh, he’ll be back,” my uncle said.

Soon, the youth pastor did come back…with a bucket of chicken.

“Is that for us?”

“No, no. You don’t get to eat until Sunday morning, remember? But Pat”—the youth pastor—“Pat and I don’t have to wait.”

“What? You’re going to eat in front of us?”

The two ministers proceeded to eat chicken in front of the outraged youth group. After eating their fill, not bothering to eat all the meat from the bones, leaving many untouched pieces still in the bucket, they got a pitcher of water and some paper towels and washed their hands over the bucket, the water falling onto the perfectly-good chicken.

At that point, the outrage turned to real anger. “This is really sick!” “I can’t believe you ruined all that food.” “And you know how hungry we are.” Hunger Pangs UUCSEA 10/11/09 Richards / 4 of 5

My uncle turned to the group. “Now,” he said, “now you know what it’s like to be poor.”

It is one thing to be poor; it is another to be poor amidst such callous prosperity.

It is painful for people to go hungry; but it is tragic because there is no need for them to go hungry.

And I know that it is all much more complicated than I am making it sound, right? There are plenty of reasons why things are as they are; there are untold challenges in feeding people that I have not acknowledged. There are political realities and economic principles and agricultural obstacles and transportation issues…

So let’s explain all those to our alien visitors, who want so much to understand our ways. Let’s explain to creatures who just stepped onto our planet how this all works.

Given that it is possible to feed everyone in the world, explain how a self-described compassionate species can allow over 1 billion of its members to go hungry.

Given that there is no shortage of food, explain how a species that supposedly cherishes its young can allow 16,000 children to die each day from hunger-related causes, about one child every five seconds. How can we, in this country, allow one in six children to live on the brink of hunger? (In our own state of Arizona, 20.2% of children under 18 are food insecure, the 6th highest rate in the country.)

Explain how America can waste 82,000 tons of food a day, while supplying only 17,000 tons in global food aid.

Explain how people can work full time and more and still not make enough money to pay for a place to live and the food to keep them alive.

Explain how $50 billion dollars pledged by the G-8 countries in global food aid by 2010 can be considered anywhere near sufficient when set against a global military expenditure of $1464 billion in 2008.

Explain how it is that the richest 499 people in this country have assets totaling the annual salaries of 30 million American workers. Let me say that again: the richest 499 people have assets totaling the annual salaries of 30 million American workers.

Explain “too big to fail.” Haven’t we already failed? If 1 billion hungry people in a world of plenty is not failure, what is? Aren’t we really talking about banks and corporations too powerful to ignore, while poor, malnourished, struggling and starving individuals are too powerless to matter? Which may help to explain how Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase, told his stockholders that 2008--a year of such calamity for so many American people, losing homes, losing jobs, losing hope—he told the stockholders of J.P. Morgan Chase that 2008 was perhaps their best year ever.

Explain to the alien beings how it is that this has happened, and when you’re done explaining how, then tell them why. Then tell me why.

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Sasha Abramsky, author of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It, said, in an interview with Laura Flanders, that while he wrote a book about hunger, he did not end up writing much about food. When people asked him why he didn’t include more suggestions for policies on food, he said, “Because we don’t have a food problem in this country; we have an income distribution problem.” Because money has been systematically directed toward the richest 1%, it is not surprising that we no longer have the tax base that would support a social safety net: food stamps, healthcare, minimum wage hike, etc.

And I don’t have to tell you that things are getting worse. The numbers of unemployed continue to rise, while the income of previously-secure families continue to fall towards poverty and homelessness and hunger. People are showing up at food banks, as Bill Clark of Philadelphia said, "terrorized," "in shock," "embarrassed" to be asking for a handout; forced to turn to charity, as Bill Moyers said, because they can’t count on justice.

And how do we explain that? How do we fix it?

Well, first we acknowledge that there are so many people in need, and we respond to that need as best we can.

The food and dollars you give today matters in the lives of real people, our neighbors in this community. We cannot slight nor underestimate the power of individual and congregational generosity. The Discretionary Fund has been a blessing to people in that we, as a congregation, are able to respond to emergency needs of individuals who have no other resources. The small amounts that we can offer help to lessen stress and avert unnecessary disaster. The assistance we give to Good Neighbor Alliance and to the St. Vincent de Paul Food Bank and to the Migrant Center through your donations and volunteer time matters, and I often wish that I could bottle up the gratitude expressed to me by volunteers at these organizations and by the individuals who are helped by your generosity so that I could bring it to you. It is clear that what you do makes a difference.

It is better to light candles than to simply curse the darkness. It is better to provide meals than to simply curse the system.

And still, the system must be changed; the darkness must be overcome for those who come this way after us. What if religious traditions came together across perceived divisions to fire public opinion with moral conviction, to change what is broken in the machinery of our economy so that it will stop breaking the lives of people in its path. Our second source calls us to confront the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.

Powers and structures of evil you say? Isn’t that a little dramatic?

The number of people who died worldwide this year from hunger, when I checked it Saturday morning, was 8,050,097, increasing by 20,000 since Friday.

So our visitors from space are still waiting for our explanation. They are waiting for us to educate them; to make them understand…not just the how, but the why. And they have one further question: why let this go on?

What will we answer? The World Without Us Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 10/18/09

Readings 1. Excerpts from The World Without Us (pgs. 87, 5) by Alan Weisman, a book which “pictures a world from which we [humans] all suddenly vanished.” What would be the effects on the natural world?:

If the dominant ungulates of the savanna—cattle—disappear, wildebeest will expand to take their place. If humans vanish, will baboons move into ours? Has their cranial capacity lay suppressed…because we got the jump on them, being first out of the trees? With us no longer in their way, will their normal potential surge to the occasion and push them into a sudden, punctuated evolutionary scramble into every cranny of our vacant niche?

…If human crops revert to a mosaic of woods and grassland, and if baboons fill our keystone slot, would they be satisfied to dwell in pure natural beauty?

Or would curiosity and sheer narcissistic delight in their unfolding powers eventually push them and their planet to the brink, too?...

[T]here are still a few Earthly spots where all our senses can inhale a living memory of this Eden before we were here. Inevitably they invite us to wonder how nature might flourish if granted the chance.

Since we’re imagining, why not also dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise? We are, after all, mammals ourselves. Every life-form adds to this vast pageant. With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet a bit more impoverished?

Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?

2. Excerpt from a letter by novelist Wallace Stegner to the Wildland Research Center at the University of California, Dec. 3, 1960: There is so much that wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle than the principles of exploitation or “usefulness” or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Sermon There is an ancient tale told of a man named Job, a wealthy yet righteous man, whose life is suddenly shattered by a series of disasters, ever-increasing in tragedy. Job cries out to God for an answer, a reason for all he has suffered, and when God finally answers, he does so in a puzzling, troubling way, the beginning of which you heard in our Opening Words:

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Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

Rather than answering Job’s plea for justice, God seems only to be throwing back questions of his own.

What kind of God is this? All these blustery questions from an apparently irritable Deity don’t add up to an answer…or do they?

If God really just wanted to assert his power and shut Job up, it seems that he could have done so in one Supremely Terrifying Sentence, one Divine Declaration of Displeasure, but his response goes on for some 130 verses. So what do these verses contain?

He describes the rhythms and beauties of the natural world; he describes the activities and proclivities of wild creatures; and though he’s responding to Job, our representative human, he mentions humans only to note their absence:

Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to make the ground put forth grass?

Or to highlight humans’ inability to understand:

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? (38:16, 18) A rhetorical question: the answer being “NO!”

Or to emphasize humans’ lack of control:

Who has let the wild ass go free?...It scorns the tumult of the city: it does not hear the shouts of the driver. Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will it spend the night at your crib? (39:5, 7, 9)

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high? (39:26-27)

This is a singular passage--sandwiched in the middle of Hebrew and Christian scriptures that are all about humans--in that it doesn’t talk about the relationship between God and humans at all. And yet, it is said to be God’s words in response to a human cry. And if we accept that the writer of Job wrote this as a true response, then the message from God to human is clear: It’s not all about you.

God in this tale is painting a picture for Job--for we humans--of a world without us.

Now granted, this may not strike you as a fitting answer to Job, either. There is nothing that justifies the suffering that Job had to experience, and that so many people experience every day on this earth. We have a responsibility to face that suffering head-on and to do our best as fellow creatures to try and alleviate it as best we can.

God offers no tidy explanation of suffering in Job…but he does place it in context. It—this grand expanse of existence; this panorama of life—it is not all about us. If we are to address suffering, we can The World Without Us UUCSEA 10/18/09 Richards / 3 of 5 do it most effectively from the awareness that the world, the universe, the cosmos does not revolve around us.

And it may be said this is something we already know.

People have known for hundreds of years that it is the earth that revolves around the sun, not the other way around, right? Well, some people…A 2005 New York Times article reports that one in five adult Americans think that the sun revolves around the earth.

And if one in five of us have not learned the fact that we are not the center of the universe, a far greater number have neglected to integrate its ramifications even if we have come to accept the science. Religion, generally speaking, stubbornly sticks to a notion that somehow, when all is said and done, humans are the reason for everything. All that went before us was simply prelude and everything that comes after us will be inconsequential as we will have either checked out of this motel in favor of eternal, ethereal digs in heaven, or God will make a new earth that we can escape to, avoiding the responsibility for the devastation we have inflicted on the old earth.

The exhibit in the Creationist Museum of humans and dinosaurs hanging out together is but one example of the human tendency to believe that it is all about us and it has always been all about us. The trouble that fundamentalist Christians have with the theory of evolution is not so much that it displaces God, but that it displaces humans from their exalted status as the proverbial apples of God’s eye. And this human hubris is as likely to show up in secular circles as in religious ones; it is sewn into the fabric of our societies, of our economies, of our ideologies. No matter how many times we are faced with the infinitesimally small segment we inhabit on the timeline of life on Earth, we find it hard to imagine that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything does not begin and end with humans; we find it hard to imagine the natural world as being anything but scenery for the great drama of human purpose; we find it hard to imagine a world without us.

But the writer of Job did just that. And so does Alan Weisman in the book entitled, The World Without Us. While the writer of Job carries us to the distant past of the dawn of creation, Weisman imagines a human-free future. What would happen if we all just disappeared…tomorrow?

Look around you, he writes, at today’s world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines? (pg. 4)

As we prepare for the International Day of Climate Action on Saturday, calling on the world to reduce to 350 parts per million C02 levels in the atmosphere, a teacher of marine chemistry and atmospheric physics at New York University speculates in A World Without Us that, while it may only take a mere 1,000 years for the ocean to absorb 90% of the excess C02 that humans have created, it would take about 100,000 years for the geologic cycle to return C02 all the way to prehuman levels (pg. 41).

And while C02 feels intangible, what about all our garbage? While there is much talk of landfills, Weisman discovers that much of what is tossed ends up in the ocean. During a 1,000 mile crossing of what is called the North Pacific Gyre, an oceanic whirlpool of sorts affectionately called by oceanographers the Great Pacific Garbage Patch because of the trash that collects there, Captain Moore The World Without Us UUCSEA 10/18/09 Richards / 4 of 5 of the Algita Marine Research Foundation calculated half a pound for every 100 square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. Returning later with a trawling device, the group found even more plastic: by weight, six times more plastic than plankton on the ocean’s surface (121).

Since no plastic has yet died a natural death, it’s hard to tell how long these would stick around once we’re gone. “Give it 100,000 years,” says a senior research scientist at North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the author of Plastics and the Environment, “I’m sure you’ll find many species of microbes whose genes will let them do this tremendously advantageous thing…It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making” (127-128).

While the things we’ve grown will perish and our farms will quickly be overrun with wildlife and forests, the things we’ve put in the soil will last all too long. Zinc lasts about 3,700 years; cadmium 7,500 years; lead 35,000 years. (To put it in context, that would put us a couple ice ages back.) And chromium apparently the most stubborn of all: 70,000 years (158).

Weisman imagines that water, diverted by human populations, will soon flow again in desert cities like Phoenix (pg. 19). Moisture will unbuild our homes, as water creeps under roofing and seeps into seams, flows from burst pipes when the temperature drops below freezing, rusts nails and screws and rots wood (pg. 15-17). In New York City, the subways will flood once the 753 pumps that keep the tunnels dry quit running (pg.25).

Most all of the things we cherish--our artwork, our literature, our architecture, our ideas--would perish with us, while so much of what we hide from ourselves—our garbage, our chemicals, the plants and animals that we blithely carry from one environment to another—would last…but life would go on.

Wild animals and plants will take over for their domestic counterparts. Though our nuclear plants would melt into blobs, releasing poisonous radiation, species would suffer through and adapt, just as Weisman reports that birds and moose and lynx and wolves have returned to the Chernobyl site in Russia. Life would go on.

And if humans disappeared, might some creature like the baboon take our spot? And if so, what then?

It is an extremely interesting journey that Weisman takes us on, and I also found the book to be greatly moving and oddly hopeful.

It is depressing, yes, to find that our most destructive creations may turn out to be our most lasting legacies. It is eye-opening to discover the constant maintenance that our technological and architectural creations require. It is heartening to note that life on earth, however challenged by human arrogance and stupidity, has ingenious ways of adapting and continuing on in one form or another. But I also found it truly inspiring to think that, if we can fully grasp our position as, not the center of all things, but newly- arrived, grateful participants in this hugely mysterious and unlikely pageant of life itself—if we can fully integrate the precariousness of our existence as a species—the joy we feel as creatures may tranform our relationship with the earth. Once we humans are relieved of the burden of carrying THE PURPOSE OF ALL THINGS, we can gladly take on the task of living wisely so that we may pass along to our children’s children’s children’s children the awesome—but by no means guaranteed—gift of living on this planet.

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Think about it: isn’t this one of the primary things we strive to teach our kids? That they are not the center of the universe? Isn’t this one of the most important signs of maturity? Isn’t it true that we know, deeply, that they—and we, and everyone—that we will only understand and be able to embrace our own true value when we truly value others, when we see our lives in context? If this is true for individuals, why should it be different for humanity itself?

It’s not all about us! But it includes us, at least for now. How can we cherish this chance that we have. How can we preserve the beauty of what is…not based on “principles of exploitation or ‘usefulness’ or even recreation,” but to “reassure ourselves of our sanity as creatures.” If we can humbly, reverently take our place embrace our place in the interdependent web of which we are a part—only a part—how might we respond to the challenges we face? Can we picture that?

Our ability to imagine just may be one of our greatest attributes as a species.

Mary Oliver writes,

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Since we’re imagining, writes Alan Weisman, why not also dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise? We are, after all, mammals ourselves. Every life-form adds to this vast pageant.

Why not also imagine a world with us?

Just imagine…

Closing Words May we dare to imagine a world without us So that we can more thoughtfully plan a world with us. May our maps of the road ahead Chart courses toward a geography of hope. May we humbly find our place in the family of things, And meet each new day, grateful to be included. The Salem Witch Trials Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 11/01/09 Reading From the 1831 Lectures on Witchcraft: Comprising a History of the Delusion in Salem in 1692 by Unitarian minister, Charles Upham, junior pastor of the First Church in Salem:

The leading features and most striking aspects of the witchcraft delusion have been repeated in places, where witches and the interference of supernatural beings are never thought of; whenever a community gives way to its passions and spurns the admonitions and casts off the restraints of reason, there is a delusion that can hardly be described in any other phrase. We cannot glance our eye over the face of our country without beholding such scenes; and so long as they are exhibited…so long as we yield to the impulse of passion, and plunge into excitement, and take counsel of our feelings rather than our judgment, we are following in the footsteps of our fanatical ancestors. It would be wiser to direct our ridicule and reproaches to the delusions of our own times, rather than to those of a previous age, and it becomes us to treat with charity and mercy the failings of our predecessors, at least until we have ceased to imitate and repeat them.

If the citizens of this place are instructed by the example of their fathers to imitate their virtues, while they avoid their errors, and if by meditating upon the tremendous tragedy that has now been related, they are led to avoid the evils that result from the unrestrained dominion of the passions and imagination, to an independent exercise of their reason and judgment on all occasions and to a careful self-control; if by contemplating the superstitions of their fathers, they are rendered more grateful in the possession of their own privileges for the acquisition of knowledge and science, and more zealous in their improvement, the lesson which providence caused to be inscribed on that page of their history which I have sought to capture in these speeches will not have been given in vain.

Sermon The Salem witch trials. A mystery from history, indeed. What was going on with those people? They seem so distant from us; more than a mere 300+ years can explain. Convicting people of supernatural crimes; trying them without granting representation; relying on the ravings of hysterical children as evidence; imprisoning, mistreating, killing people based on this fantastical evidence… It is as if they came from a whole other world. It is as if they come, not from our history, but from the pages of a work of fiction, a dark, twisted, tragic fantasy.

But they do, after all, come from our history, from American history, and more specifically, in a very real way, from our history, from Unitarian history.

If you go to the web site of the First Church in Salem, Unitarian and look at their Frequently Asked Questions, you will find this question at the top:

Was your church involved in the witch hysteria of Salem Village in 1692?

Short answer? Yes.

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It was not the church where the witch hysteria first began. That was nearby in Salem Village, a town now called Danvers. But the hysteria soon spread to First Church in Salem, with two of its members being tried, convicted, and executed.

And, no, there were no Unitarian congregations in America in 1692. These were Puritan churches. But the Puritan churches provided the basic congregational structure that we practice today. Congregational polity, it is called: the idea that the congregation should be the final authority on matters pertaining to the congregation. Puritans joined together around covenant rather than creed. Though we find ourselves quite distant from the Puritans in doctrinal theology (what they believed about God, the Bible, heaven and hell, sin), we have built upon their relational theology (how we join together in community, how we make decisions, how we encourage and support one another). Congregationalist. And you will find that many Puritan congregations, like the one in Salem, became Unitarian congregations.

There’s a lot of fascinating history that we don’t have time to talk about today…but this is progress, right? At least from our point of view. As author Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose grandfather had been a judge at the Salem witch trials, wrote of the Puritans, “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.” A congregation that was swept up in the hysteria of the witch trials finds its way to affirming and promoting the values of human reason, religious freedom and tolerance, and a dedication to compassion as the final measure of any religion or religious endeavor. Sounds like a happy ending to me.

…not so fast.

As you may have guessed, I think there’s more on which we might choose to reflect concerning the Salem witch trials. As Charles Upham writes: “it becomes us to treat with charity and mercy the failings of our predecessors, at least until we have ceased to imitate and repeat them.” If we are not to imitate and repeat their failings, we must try to identify those failings, admittedly from our own distant and necessarily biased view.

First of all, we have to understand the context. The sort of witchcraft that so worried these people was not some odd belief of a fringe group. Though the Salem witch trials have a high profile, many witch hunts and witch trials took place across Europe in that time period, too.

Which makes me wonder: what are the things that we believe in now, those things that are sewn into our culture so seamlessly that we don’t even bother to question them, but which future generations will puzzle over, saying, “How could they believe that?”

Secondly, once we’ve recognized context, we should guard against oversimplifying motivation. When we look back at the past, we think of things in these sweeping generalizations. “People did this, because they believed this.” And that may even be accurate—in part. But it’s never that simple, is it? The ongoing mystery of history is that there is no single cause for the effect that we see. There are many factors to consider.

Some of the charges that were leveled against “witches” back in 1692 had to do with personal relationships, business dealings, and societal status. As pointed out in the story earlier, some say that adults “suggested” names of witches to the children, to settle personal scores, to grab their land or property, simply to control others (always a powerful temptation, it seems). The Salem Witch Trials UUCSEA 11/01/09 Richards / 3 of 6

It is possible that the children were seeking attention and the circumstances swiftly spun out of their control.

It has been noted that the minister at Salem Village was under extreme fire from members of the congregation over the details of his “compensation package.” The first people to be “bewitched” were members of his household…though I hesitate to make any direct accusations from this vantage point, it was certainly a convenient distraction from the problems he faced, and he became one of the leaders propelling the trials and convictions.

A minister who had served the congregation briefly years earlier, leaving amidst dissension and upheaval in the congregation, was named as the leader of the witches, his “spirit” or “spectre” said to have visited the girls, inviting them to join him. He was arrested at his new home in Maine, brought to Salem, tried and convicted. The famous Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, a primary supporter of the witch trials, had long suspected Burroughs of heresy (of being a Baptist rather than a Puritan). He presided over Burroughs’ execution, defending the act against those who were having second thoughts about killing their former minister.

And we may look at all of these things and cry, “Hypocrisy!” It wasn’t really about superstition at all; it was about greed and power and selfishness. These people didn’t believe in witches; they said they believed in witches in order to get what they wanted.

But if we go there, I think we are escaping the complexity of human history and human nature. We are underestimating the ingenious (and diabolical) ways in which humans try (against all odds) to correlate beliefs and reason and desires; the contortions we can find ourselves in as we seek to justify the unjustifiable.

Cotton Mather may not have been disingenuous when he called Burroughs a witch; he may have genuinely suspected him as a witch because he knew him as a heretic. In other words, Mather may have considered that Burroughs’ heresy was evidence of witchery; he may have reasoned that the devil could find no better tool than a minister that would spread his heresies among the faithful.

People who suggested names of their enemies to the girls may not have been doing so cynically; they may have thought back to circumstances, in which these people had acted particularly mean, remembered an evil glint in their eye or some suspicious activity and a misfortune that occurred directly thereafter. They may have convinced themselves that they were doing a public service, protecting others from this potential evil. They may have convinced themselves that they were only suggesting the name as a possibility, and that it was up to the girls to confirm the person as a witch, a test that their very courts, after all, were willing to accept.

And this is not, in any way, to be taken as justification for what was done. But it is to say that evil is very rarely carried out by evil people doing evil things. It is most often carried out by people doing evil things for what they have convinced themselves are very good reasons. It is to say that the evil things are not recognized as such until the whole elaborate justification system is challenged. Religion, ideally, can supply the questions that challenge the system; at its worst, it supplies the justifications that lead us to evil.

The Salem Witch Trials UUCSEA 11/01/09 Richards / 4 of 6

The question becomes: how does religion address our inevitable fears? Does it help us to make peace with our fears, or does it provide an illusory target by which we might rid ourselves of fear?

In the case of the Puritans, they had many real things to fear, as was pointed out in the story:

The uncertainty surrounding property laws, the struggle to make a living, widespread disease, troubles within the congregation that was meant to be their haven, threats from the native population in retaliation for egregious actions by the settlers…

And Puritan theology held that God was in control; human will and actions played no part. God’s sovereign will reigned over all things so that the faithful could not question; only humbly accept. UNLESS…

Unless some of the bad things that were happening to them were actually the result of evil agents; witches, and not God.

You see, it is possible that the witches were not the source of this community’s fears, but the tragically misguided answer to fears that already existed. Rather than quietly accepting the will of God, they could suddenly fight against the forces of evil. Rather than resigning themselves to the inherent insecurity of their existence, they could create security by attacking the newly identified cause. It even seemed to work…for a short time.

But the numbers of accused kept growing and soon it was not just the unconventional and the outcasts, but respected members of the congregations, friends and neighbors who were imprisoned. And the declarations of innocence before the executions, when these individuals had nothing to gain thereby, seemed to ring true. And all the supposed evidence seemed weak, and the many trials seemed like a bad dream, and the problems that they had before were still there, and the desperately dramatic attempts on behalf of these Puritans to rescue themselves from evil had only drawn them deeply into evil.

And the fear was still with them, because there is a fear that is a natural companion to existence, the fear of all that is, and will continue to be, outside our control.

Are there things for us to learn here? How are we dealing with fear today?

We, like the Puritans, have some reasonable fears with which to grapple: hunger, climate change, undeclared wars with no foreseeable endpoint, vanishing resources, economic devastation, unemployment, home foreclosures, health care reform (or the lack thereof), ongoing human rights abuses...and, of course, that underlying anxiety about all that lies outside our control.

And I think that we in this country may be in a particularly vulnerable place when it comes to dealing with fears. I think that the relative isolation and insulation of this society has led to the illusion of complete security. I think that advances in technology and science and weaponry have led to the illusion of complete control. “Our war on terror will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated," President Bush said. We’ll attack them today so they don’t attack us tomorrow. "We'll fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here." The White House web site proclaims that President Obama’s “highest priority is to keep the American people safe.” That has the ring of an absolute. Safe from what? From everything? And at what price?

The Salem Witch Trials UUCSEA 11/01/09 Richards / 5 of 6

Whatever you think of the "war on terror," my guess is that it's not "a new kind of war" at all; it's as old as the witch trials; it’s as old as human consciousness.

Increase Mather, Puritan minister and father of Cotton Mather, sensing the tide of public opinion turning against the trials, wrote a document that recommended the same rules of evidence in prosecuting witches that were used for any other capital crime. He wrote, “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned.” Justice and compassion, in other words, must take precedence over security. Are we willing to commit to that?

We may look back and shake our heads at the shoddy legal standards set at the Salem witch trials, but listen to this:

In the November 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Petra Bartosiewicz quotes an FBI affidavit defending their detention of questionable suspects, saying, “that even the possessors of [important] intelligence might not be aware of the significance of what they knew, and so they could be detained simply because the agency was “unable to rule out” their value.

So not only is the United States detaining people who have no charges brought against them on the suspicion that they might be dangerous, we are holding people because they might know something they don’t even know they know, and though we don’t yet know what it is, we can’t prove it’s not there, so we’ll keep them in detention.

We may bemoan the twenty innocent people that were executed in 1692 for no good reason, but listen to this:

In the Oct. 26, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, Jane Mayer writes, “[T]he recent campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud [leader of the Taliban and one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan] offers a sobering case study of the hazards of robotic warfare. It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C.I.A. succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between 207 and 321 additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon. It’s all but impossible to get a complete picture of whom the C.I.A. killed during this campaign…”

Presently, this administration has re-branded the grandly provocative “war on terror” to the seemingly innocuous “overseas contingency operation,” but have any of the strategies changed? Are our stated goals reasonable? Are our tactics acceptable? Are our processes just? Or will we come to the end of this “terror hysteria” with the tragic understanding that we have become participants in the evil we are desperately guarding ourselves against.

We may shudder at the thoughts of the public executions that were carried out during the witch trials, but that may also be key to why they ended. What price do we pay for having the deaths carried out by men and machines a world away, safely hidden away from our collective conscience?

Have we learned from the failings of our predecessors so that we will not imitate or repeat them?

As we wave goodbye to this Halloween, it is worth remembering that the scariest things we face are the extreme measures that humans sometimes take to alleviate fear and anxiety, most especially that fear and anxiety that is an inescapable component of existence. And the greatest hopes lie in our ability to The Salem Witch Trials UUCSEA 11/01/09 Richards / 6 of 6 expose our own justifications for evil and put our energies toward extending the breadth and depth of our compassion.

That is, undoubtedly, a risky endeavor, but a risk worth taking. U & U: The Merger of Unitarianism and Universalism Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 11/15/09

Reading From The Unitarian Universalist Merger: 1961-1975, a report of the Commission on Appraisal to the 14th General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Minneapolis, MN, 1975:

The Universalist and Unitarian denominations were founded by theological liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries…Both denominations traced their roots far back into the distant past. Both were founded on hopeful heresies and from the time of their origin have been strikingly optimistic in their understanding of God, human nature, salvation. Both have been strikingly open and inclusive in their attitudes toward the world’s varied religions and scriptures…

We started in different ways and under different circumstances. It has been said of the Universalists: “They began with neither script nor purse,” with only a great theological principle, and gathered their congregations largely from the un-churched, and from dissident elements in the orthodox churches. Membership was recruited from small tradesmen, farmers and wage earners. Their preachers were, with few exceptions, of scant formal education.

On the other hand, from the movement’s beginning in New England, the Unitarians had strong churches, long established. When the American Unitarian Association was organized in 1825, some 150 liberal Christian churches became Unitarian. Among them were many of New England’s strongest and most historic congregations. The clergy were highly educated and the membership, on the whole, affluent and cultured…

…Both Unitarians and Universalists embarked on merger with many positive and negative expectations. These hopes and fears were prominent in the pre-merger debates and discussion and once the merger took place were carried on into the life of the new Association.

We are asking ourselves where we are now in the light of some of the expectations we held at the time of the merger…Our expectations today are changed; we should work together to articulate them. Thus, we can achieve a new sense of purpose and relieve ourselves of the numbing anxieties and regrets that stem from clinging to unrealistic hopes and continually failing in what we think we are trying to do. It is not a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic. It is a matter of being, at the same time, honest, imaginative, and committed.

Sermon Unitarian Universalist is a mouthful when you're simply trying to explain where you go on Sunday mornings, isn't it? Inspired by our resident Haiku creator, [RC], I came up with this haiku to illustrate the point:

Unitarian don't stop...five more syllables Universalist

U & U: The Merger of Unitarianism and Universalism UUCSEA 11/15/09 Richards / 2 of 5

Some wonder if we really need all ten of these syllables to describe our present-day faith. Are the two rather cumbersome words simply irrelevant leftovers from our history? Do they still have meaning today?

First, we should note that this congregation is not simply Unitarian, nor is it simply Universalist. Individuals exploring our history, drawing from their own experience, may identify more strongly with one than with another. Many of us, me included, are sometimes led to the convenient shorthand of just using the first word when identifying our congregation, saying that we are Unitarian. Others point out that there is no hyphen in our name, so that Unitarian exists only as an adjective describing the type of Universalism.

“I’m Universalist.” “Oh, what kind?” “I’m a Unitarian Universalist.”

But, however you wish to interpret our new name, the fact is that approximately 50 years ago a new thing was born under the sun by the consolidation of the Universalist Church of American and the American Unitarian Association to create Unitarian Universalist Association. Unitarian Universalism grew from Unitarianism and Universalism, but is, I think, uniquely its own movement.

The official consolidation—not, technically, a merger—took place in 1961, but in October of 1959—50 years ago--delegates from each organization (about 400 Universalists and 600 Unitarians) gathered in Syracuse, NY to negotiate any remaining obstacles on the road to merger. They flipped the switch that set the plan for consolidation in motion. Some have said that if Unitarians and Universalists were married in 1961, 1959 was the official announcement of their engagement.

And, if we wish to follow this courtship analogy to silly extremes, we can say that these two religious bodies took part in many years of flirtation before their engagement, dating (so to speak) all the way back to 1865.

The process was truly impressive. Reportedly, “the foremost concern of the Joint Merger Commission was to involve all of the local congregations in a meaningful decision-making process. That included making certain that they had the necessary material for a careful consideration of the issues. Regular reports were issued to the congregations.” The process brought out many fears:

Some Unitarians feared that Unitarianism would lose its distinctive identity. Some feared that the momentum of growth that the Unitarians had been experiencing would be slowed down as they combined with the Universalists, who were in a phase of decline in membership numbers. (In 1888, Universalism was the sixth largest denomination in the U.S. By the second quarter of the 20th century, it had become one of the smallest. Partly, this was due to the fact that it had become easier to maintain Universalist theology in mainstream congregations, so that it no longer seemed necessary to join a Universalist congregation.)

Some Universalists feared the prospect of Universalism being, not only merged with, but submerged in Unitarianism. They were very excited about exploring a new understanding of their own tradition, best expressed by Robert Cummings, General Superintendent of the Universalist Church of America, when he said:

Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect. For so long as Universalism is universalism and not partialism, the fellowship bearing its name must succeed in making it unmistakably clear that all are U & U: The Merger of Unitarianism and Universalism UUCSEA 11/15/09 Richards / 3 of 5 welcome: theist and humanist, unitarian and trinitarian, colored and color-less. A circumscribed Universalism is unthinkable.

They worried that this dynamic process of redefining Universalism would be set aside to deal with the intricacies and challenges of the consolidation with Unitarianism.

Some worried that humanist groups in both Unitarianism and Universalism would now join together to push liberal Christians and other theists to the margins.

Some worried that the liberal Christians would now join together to highlight the Christian heritage of both movements and to push humanists to the margins.

There were plenty of fears…but…BUT…

In the first plebiscite (direct vote of the members) carried out by the Merger Commission, where participants were asked to vote approval or disapproval of merger and then to choose between six alternatives, 73 percent of Unitarian congregations participated with 74 percent in favor of merger (or consolidation). 69 percent of Universalist congregations participated with 75 percent favoring merger.

In the second plebiscite, which called for a vote on a single plan of consolidation, approximately 142,000 votes were cast, with 125,000 in favor and 17,000 against. “Raymond Hopkins, Secretary of the Merger Commission commented, ‘It is safe to say that our societies have never responded in such numbers and with such seriousness as they did to the subject of merger. Opponents of the plan thought they had won when they succeeded in getting included in the plan a provision that unless sixty percent of the local societies participated and favored merger by at least seventy-five percent, the plan would not be approved. History prior to and since this vote was on their side. Only thirty to fifty percent of our societies bother to send delegates to the General Assemblies. Only ten to fifteen percent ever participate in the Parish Poll. Denominational surveys are lucky if they get twenty-five to thirty percent response. Yet ninety four percent of the Unitarian societies and ninety-five percent of the Universalist societies participated in the plebiscite that required a special congregational meeting for the purpose.”

There were fears surrounding the consolidation. But the desire to “marry” the two traditions proved to be immensely more powerful.

So what was the attraction?

They came from different backgrounds, certainly; opposite sides of the tracks, as it were. Though both have Christian roots, Unitarianism grew out of the well-respected Congregationalist church, while Universalism arose on the fringes of orthodoxy. Unitarianism grew from the educated and cultured classes. Universalism reached out to the working class and rural populations, valuing common sense and inspiration. But they came together in their opposition to certain aspects of Calvinism. They each represented, as the reading pointed out, a “hopeful heresy.” It is the content of these heresies that created the two words that give us our name.

The word Unitarian comes from our theological ancestors’ rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity (three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in one God). Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, said in his sermon, Unitarian Christianity, “We believe…that there is one God and one only…We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God.” U & U: The Merger of Unitarianism and Universalism UUCSEA 11/15/09 Richards / 4 of 5

More specifically, it revolved around a difference of opinion as to the nature and mission of Jesus. Unitarians believed that Jesus was human, sent by God, and that he calls us to compassionate and ethical action by his teachings and the example of his life.

The word Universalist comes from our theological ancestors’ rejection of the doctrine of eternal punishment of sinners. Convinced by such Biblical passages as Romans 5:18—“one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all”—Universalists asserted that a loving God, who calls us to love our enemies, would be acting in a morally inferior manner in sentencing people to eternal suffering in hell. Thus, the doctrine of universal salvation; God’s love embraces all.

Interesting history. Worthy heresies. But, on the surface, they hardly seem relevant to present-day Unitarian Universalism. How did we get from there to here?

I can understand that it’s a little puzzling. These are not the issues that captivate us today. These are not the characteristics that define us.

It does seem ironic that Unitarian Universalism—a religion focused on the present, this mortal life and our responsibilities therein—should have originated from doctrines about the distant past (the nature of Jesus and ancient arguments about God) and the unforeseeable future (life after death, eternal salvation). But let’s look again.

Unitarianism, in refusing to worship Jesus as God but rather to learn from him as teacher and ethical model, helped to move our eyes from the past to the present. The question was not “What did Jesus do for you?” but “Given the example of Jesus, what do you choose to do now?”

Universalism, in rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell and affirming universal salvation, helped to move our eyes from the future to the present. The question was not “Are you saved?” but “You are saved…now what?” The question was not “Where will you spend eternity?” but “How will you express your gratitude in this life?”

We don’t have to believe as our ancestors did about specific theological matters to benefit from the ramifications of their convictions. Both Unitarianism and Universalism help to direct religious focus to the present time; to our gratitude for what we have and to our responsibility for the world we wish to help build. Both Unitarianism and Universalism have called us to stretch beyond the comfortable to the compassionate; from easy agreement to deeper understanding; from uniformity to unity.

We may regret sometimes the awkwardness, question the appropriateness, of our ten-syllable name--if we were going to create something new with the consolidation, might it have been advisable to call us something new? There was some talk at the time of calling the consolidated organization The United Liberal Church of America—but I also marvel at the wonderful balance that our name represents at its best, when we honor its fullness, five syllables on each side, two traditions that have nourished something new.

Here's what Bill Sinkford, Unitarian Universalist Association President, had to say in 2003 about the meaning of these two words to him:

The Unitarian side tells us that there is only one God, one spirit of life, one power of love. The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, valuing the spark of divinity U & U: The Merger of Unitarianism and Universalism UUCSEA 11/15/09 Richards / 5 of 5 that is in every human being...So my version of what Unitarian Universalism stands for is, "One God, no one left behind."

Put another way, Unitarian and Universalist might refer to “the one and the many.” We juggle the concepts of the one and the many throughout our congregational life. We honor the integrity of the individual in searching for truth and meaning and we proclaim the importance of relationship in asking that individual to share the fruits of that search in community. Our principles begin with the inherent worth and dignity of every person and end with respect for the interdependent web of all existence. We uphold the power of the individual congregation in managing the affairs of that congregation and we also expect that congregations will be in willing and productive association with one another, working together to fulfill the vision of a vibrant presence for liberal religion in the world at large.

Universalism organized in this country in 1793; Unitarianism in 1825. In October of 1959, 1,000 Unitarian and Universalist delegates worked through this final question before the plan toward consolidation could continue: should the 2nd of the six original principles read:

To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to man;

“our Judeo-Christian heritage,” or “the Judeo Christian heritage.” It was decided in favor of “the,” and at that moment, writes Barry Lentz, “shortly before noon on October 31, 1959, Unitarian Universalism was born as a religious movement that radically transcended its Christian heritage to become a spiritual harbor for religious and secular humanists, pagans, deists, theists, atheists and a variety of other faith persuasions. In the fifty years since consolidation the Unitarian Universalist movement has grown in many ways. One way in which we have not grown is in developing a common understanding of the distinct nature of Unitarian Universalism, its call and its promise to the world.”

That is our task: we can embrace our Unitarian Universalist identity in a way that offers hope to a world in need. We can articulate its promise so that we may fulfill its potential. We can become who we started out to be fifty years ago. Guest at Your Table Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 11/22/09

Readings The Arc of the Universe: In an 1853 sermon, “Of Justice and Conscience,” Unitarian Minister Theodore Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but a little way; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

On March 25, 1965, when racial progress in America seemed unspeakably slow, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “I know you are asking today, How long will it take?...I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow…How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Barack Obama, speaking on the 40th anniversary of King’s death in a speech on April 4, 2008, added: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice…But here is the thing. It does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice, because we organize and we mobilize, we march, we vote…So let us each do our part to bend that arc. Let’s bend it towards justice. Let’s bend that arc towards opportunity. Let’s bend that arc towards prosperity for all. And if we can do that and march together, as one nation, and one people, then…we’ll be making real the words of the Hebrew prophet, Amos, that Dr. King invoked so often: let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Sermon We are quickly moving into the “gift-giving season.” “Gift-giving” sounds like fun. It sounds like a celebration. It sounds like happiness and joy in giving and receiving…

But it’s a lot of pressure, too, right? It’s a lot of work; a lot of thought; a lot of planning and worry. What do I get for?????: fill in the blank. What if I get them something they don’t like? What if I forget someone who should be on my list? What is the right gift? What is the appropriate gift? What is proper? What is sufficient?

There’s a whole intricate algebra of gift-giving by which we may assign values to the variables of relationship types (based on familiarity, reciprocity, and societal expectations), and the gifts (based on the origin of the gift—homemade or purchased—its uniqueness, the amount of time or thought that went into it), which presumably allows one to then find the appropriate present. Many of us still come to the end of the equation scratching our heads in confusion; somehow it doesn’t all add up.

We fall back on the old adage that it is not the gift after all, but the thought that counts. And we also seek out ways to give that truly matter.

Guest at Your Table UUCSEA 11/22/09 Richards / 2 of 6

We turn from the frustration of finding something for the person who has everything (what could they possibly need?) to the much more profound offering of giving to those who we know are in need. We visit those who are ill; we give to the discretionary fund and Circulo de Amigas and the food banks and the migrant center; we donate to those organizations that are engaged in worthy causes; we put our money to work both within our community and across the world…This feels more important than the exchange of gifts that we strain to buy; presents that are enthused over for a moment and then placed on a shelf and forgotten; things that are just things given to people who most often don’t need or want them.

But even charity--thoughtful, targeted giving to help people in need—is not without its own anxiety. How do we use our limited resources--both time and money--wisely? Where does our money go and how is it used? How much do we give and to whom? Why does it never feel as satisfying as it should? Why does it never seem to make a difference?

Each year, we ask for your donations to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. You can read their mission statement on your order of service today. They have a web site—the address is there on your order of service—that helps to answer some of the questions we have. It gives us some of those tangible statistics that help us to visualize how we are helping with our donations. For example:

• $40 buys materials for a woman in Northern Uganda to make her own groundnut sheller. A groundnut sheller helps to reduce women's workload and generate needed income for families, as residents return home after more than 20 years of war.

• $66 pays for door-to-door campaigning in Soweto, South Africa, to educate people about their human right to water — as guaranteed by their constitution — and helps to carry out inspections by residents of municipal water services.

• $170 purchases a month's supply of chemicals and testing strips for members of indigenous communities in San Marcos, Guatemala, to carry out water-quality monitoring of rivers downstream from the GOLDCORP mine.

• $200 would buy a bicycle ambulance (a stretcher pulled by a bicycle) for a resettled village several miles from a health center in Northern Uganda.

• $500 funds travel for U.S.-based torture survivors to Washington, D.C., to share their stories and lobby Congress to end state-sponsored torture.

• $600 repairs a home in Gaza, under a home repair program run by youth groups.

And this list goes on, up to:

• $8,000 pays for a women's center in Darfur, where women receive training in their rights and small business management, as well as business funds. The women's centers also help women organize their firewood committees. They also provide a place for psycho-social counseling and a Guest at Your Table UUCSEA 11/22/09 Richards / 3 of 6

chance for women to learn new skills. The funds pay for the construction of the center, staffing, equipment, and supports the start-up of small businesses.

• $10,000 provides human-rights training workshops for 100 schoolteachers in Afghanistan during their summer break.

This gives some indication of the many activities that the UUSC is involved in and the number of ways in which our contributions are put to work. And it is worth remembering that behind each of these activities are the many stories of individuals. For instance, we can read:

• $65 pays for a small business loan for a displaced woman in Kenya. Kakamega Grassroots Initiative organizes women displaced by the 2008 electoral violence into groups of 20 and provides them with training and small business loans. There is a very high rate of repayment and the first group of recipients is now on their second loan.

And to put this in context, we should also know about Jacinta:

Jacinta is a tailor in the town of Machakos, Kenya. With the help of her young apprentice, she makes a living by weaving and selling school uniforms in her one-room market stall. “On busy days, we set up the loom on the sidewalk to attract more business,” she says.

Vendors here in this bustling marketplace sell a little bit of everything. Men usually handle durable goods, such as shoes and electronics. Women typically deal in less expensive perishable items, such as fruits and vegetables. The streets are lined with neat piles of fresh produce: cabbages, potatoes, bananas, and leafy greens.

As customers come and go, money changes hands all day. Although it is informal, this kind of work represents a large and critical segment of the economy, employing over 60 percent of Kenyans. Yet most people work without adequate legal or social protections, making the day-to-day operation of their small businesses all the more challenging.

This is why Jacinta and many of the traders here belong to the Kenya Alliance of Street Vendors and Informal Traders (KENASVIT), a UUSC partner and a collective voice for the rights of informal workers. As one of KENASVIT’s many women leaders, Jacinta is also chairperson of the Machakos Group for the Disabled.

In 2008, when post-election violence rippled across Kenya, KENASVIT, with UUSC’s support, had an important role to play in helping vendors rebuild their lives – and help each other in the process.

After Jacinta lost all of her wares in riots, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to start again. “Without collateral or experience with credit, I didn’t have any chance of getting a loan from a bank,” she explained, “even a small one, like I needed.” As a single mother, she worried about how she would provide for herself and her four children.

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Then she found out about the recovery program and revolving-loan fund designed by KENASVIT and UUSC to help vendors get back on their feet.

With a small business loan of $70 at the fund’s reasonable five-percent (5%) interest rate, Jacinta was able to restart her tailoring business. She purchased new supplies and repaired her loom. Now, her repayments are helping other vendors to take out loans: “I repaid my loan as fast as I could, so others can benefit.” Some of the loan’s interest is even supporting grassroots groups like the Machakos Group for the Disabled.

Because the revolving-loan fund is democratically administered by members themselves, it is strengthening members’ business skills and their sense of solidarity. That is what is so special about KENASVIT and the way it organizes. “It was my fellow vendors who gave me this loan,” shared Jacinta. “And we are determined as a group to support each other in every way that we can.”

You can read this detail:

• $1065 would purchase a professional video camera and materials to document the worldwide struggle for water justice and makes videos available for educational campaigns on the human right to water.

And, to put this in context, we should also know about Guadalupe:

Guadalupe lives in the small town of Tonyville, CA. Most people in Tonyville work as farmers, and many speak Spanish.

In California, food is big business. Farms in the Golden State grow over half of all the fruits and vegetables we eat in this country, from lettuce to green grapes to bright red strawberries. They also make most of our milk and cheese.

It takes a lot of water to make that much food. It takes millions of gallons of fresh, clean water.

But what about the people who live in California, near these big farms? Is their water clean enough to drink? Or to cook with or take a bath?

A few years ago, Guadalupe and her neighbors noticed that there was something wrong with their tap water during some months of the year.

“When we drank it, the water had the same metal taste as when you have a coin in your mouth,” said Guadalupe. “It also smelled horrible.”

Unable to drink the water in their homes, Guadalupe and her neighbors decided to investigate where their water comes from and why it sometimes tasted so bad.

When they brought a water sample to a laboratory to be tested, they learned that it had dangerous levels of a chemical called nitrate in it. Nitrate is used in fertilizers to make plants grow fast, and it is also found in livestock and animal wastes.

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Did Guadalupe and her neighbors continued their investigation. They decided to find out why the water company was not making their water clean and safe enough for families to drink year-round. They also wanted to know how the law could help them.

With support from the Community Water Center, a UUSC partner based in California, Guadalupe and her neighbors created a special water group called La Voz de Tonyville. That is Spanish for “The Voice of Tonyville.”

Together, they convinced the state of California to issue an order requiring their water company to produce clean, safe drinking water all 12 months of the year. Now Guadalupe and her neighbors can drink the water that is piped into their homes.

Across California, more and more people like Guadalupe are learning about their water and how to protect it. UUSC is joining them. This year, the Community Water Center, UUSC, the UU Legislative Ministry in CA, and hundreds of their friends headed to Sacramento, the California state capital, to help pass a new law called The Human Right to Water Act of 2009. Though the Governor vetoed this bill just recently, he did sign several environmental justice bills, including AB 626 which requires that at least 10% of funds from Prop 84 go to support water projects for disadvantaged communities in every region of the state.

In a letter to Unitarian Universalist congregations of California, Rev. Lindi Ramsden wrote:

Over time, the water wears away the rock. So it will be with water justice.

The water wears away the rock…the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice…we can join in the effort. If we insist that justice flow like water, that rock will wear away more quickly. If we put our hands to the arc, it will bend more surely.

Let’s be clear…nothing we give will ever be enough! It will not be enough to end the need; it will not be enough to satisfy our desire to help; it will not be enough to keep us from requesting donations again next year or next month or next week. We cannot give enough.

But there is a gift that you give with each donation that is just right; there is a present that comes along with whatever material gift that you can offer to the many activities of the UUSC that is precisely what is needed, and it doesn’t take up any room in the envelope and it doesn’t require extra postage. There is a miraculous gift that you give by making a place in your life for a guest at your table, a guest whom you may never meet…“Stories of Hope” is the title of the collection that includes the individual stories I shared with you today. The gift that comes along with whatever else you give is just that: hope.

It can be given to people we know in our lives, by a kind word, a visit, meeting a need, a gift for no particular reason, emotional, physical, financial, spiritual support when we are feeling helpless and hopeless. And humans have this amazing capacity to give hope to people they don’t even know. We can care about people who are strangers to us, and we can offer to help those people as best we can. The benefits of this are not only contained in the amount that we give or the particulars of what that can purchase, but in the very act of giving beyond the circumscribed range of our own personal lives. Hope is embedded in all our acts of compassion and--because we can imaginatively extend ourselves into Guest at Your Table UUCSEA 11/22/09 Richards / 6 of 6 another’s life, because we have the awesome capacity to empathize—we can offer this compassion across the world. Like a world-saving virus, hope travels across all borders to infect us.

Hope is as necessary to our existence as food and water. It is the gift we share with one another…to resort to the old cliché, hope is the gift that keeps on giving. We can help to restore faith in humanity; we can help rekindle a dream for a future; we can help to strengthen a trust in life itself…and when we do that for someone else, we inspire the same in ourselves. When we give, we receive, hope.

The perfect gift… Race Matters Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 12/06/09

Opening Words (#662 Singing the Living Tradition, A. Powell Davies) The years of all of us are short, our lives precarious. Our days and nights go hurrying on and there is scarcely time to do the little that we might. Yet we find time for bitterness, for petty treason and evasion. What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? Here we are—all of us—all upon this planet, bound together in a common destiny, Living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark. Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things else? How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!

Readings 1. From an article entitled “Red Scare, Black Scare,” by JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation, December 7, 2009: An image of President Obama as Witch Doctor was forwarded to a listserv of tea-party zealots a few months ago by Dr. David McKalip, a right-wing Florida neurosurgeon…The image is a pastiche. Obama's head is grafted onto a picture of a man wearing nothing but bead necklaces and a loincloth, his legs spread wide, his long, thick fingers grasping a stick in front of him. There's a bone through his nose and a confection of feathers and flowers on his head. The picture evokes the world of National Geographic that once gave children a guiltless excuse to indulge their curiosity in the flesh…Liberal bloggers who had made a cottage industry out of caricaturing George W. Bush were predictably appalled, but the unknown graphic artist and McKalip did the country a perverse favor. More than all the words on the subject spilled so far, this lone image banishes the nonsense of postracial America…

Right-wing radio hosts incessantly deplore a regime of "political correctness" that has whites on the run. The radio, the direct-mail pieces, the calls at dinnertime…are all on-message: the leader of this regime is by turns a fool and a tyrant, an antiwhite racist whose fealty is not to the USA but to government, debt, appeasement, socialism, communism. If he is not himself a terrorist, terror is what he inspires. No one need say he's out to sap white culture and rape white women; it's enough that he will enslave their children, the black man's revenge. How quaint it all seems that just a year ago some leftists were saying that Obama had dodged the expected racist volleys because his story is not a black story but an immigrant story. Somehow, in all the hoopla, they forgot about Africa.

2. From an article entitled “The New Inquisition,” by Laila Lalami, reviewing the book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell, The Nation, December 14, 2009: …[C]ultures are not static; they change all the time. Of course Europe’s culture will change as a result of its demographic shifts, but that change need not (indeed, it should not) be turned into a culture war between Islam and the West…Not surprisingly, the argument that Muslims are trying to “conquer” Europe “street by street” in order to turn it into an outpost of Islam has been taken at face value. But this argument is not serious criticism because it is not based on thorough empirical evidence; it is racism. Race Matters UUCSEA 12/06/09 Richards / 2 of 5

Sermon Remember when racism ended? Remember when we became a “post-racial” society? With the election of Barak Obama as President, many were celebrating America’s entrance into a new age that truly was color-blind, in the best possible sense. Race and racism, though awkward and painful issues in the past, were no longer factors as we looked toward the future. Just as science had debunked the idea of definitive racial classifications, racial assumptions and stereotypes had now lost validity in society at large. A new day had dawned.

But the sun set all too soon on that new day. Soon we had the case of African American Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates and his unpleasant encounter with a policeman as Gates sought entrance to his own home, having forgotten his house key. We had the case of a Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to conduct a marriage ceremony for an interracial couple, saying he was concerned about “the children.” We had the confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court Justice nominee, who was assumed to be biased by some members of Congress because she was Latina. We had a former President charging that coarse expressions of virulent opposition to President Obama himself were inspired in no small part by racism. We had responses from conservative commentators that such charges of racism were unsupported by the facts, and were instead inspired by liberal guilt, political correctness and “reverse racism.”

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of racism’s death appears to have been greatly exaggerated.

Which is not to denigrate the progress that has been made. I, too, thrilled with others to think that a man who once would have worked on building the White House as a slave now entered it as the country’s elected leader. I, too, am inspired by a younger generation that often gathers comfortably in multi- racial, multi-cultural communities. I, too, look toward that day when all people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.

And I understand the eagerness to usher in that time.

I understand the inclination to believe that maybe if we say we’ve arrived, we can really be there. Maybe if we stop concentrating on race, racism will cease to be an issue. Maybe if we pretend racism isn’t there, it will disappear.

I understand those wishes…but a wish is not a strategy. Pretending racism doesn’t exist does not make it disappear; it simply hides it from our view. And any psychologist knows that those things that we hide from ourselves can be the most powerful influences on our lives; and all too often, the most destructive.

The healthy way to address a problem is to first raise it to awareness; to face it squarely.

Which sounds simple enough…but racism is difficult to face squarely. It hides in plain sight. It is more easily seen out of the corner of one’s eye. Chameleon-like, it adapts to its surroundings and tries to pass as common-sense, criminal justice, national security, religious conviction, political insight, hard-won experience…tries to pass as anything else.

It pops up in such seemingly innocent ways:

Race Matters UUCSEA 12/06/09 Richards / 3 of 5

Think about the books you read: when a character is a person of color, that is noted in the description, while the “race” of white people is never mentioned; it is, after all, the default.

Think about how often you hear phrases like: the African American community; the Asian American community. Who speaks for these “communities?” Do you ever hear from a spokesperson for the White American community? How absurd would that sound?

Racism can entwine itself around any part of our collective lives and so fully submerge in its host that it seems almost impossible to recognize. It feeds on denial. “Well, that’s not racism; that’s just ______.” Fill in the blank.

And the ones who name it; the ones who recognize the impact of unfounded assumptions, inaccurate stereotypes, buried fears, and name it racism, they are the ones who are made to look foolish.

“Racism, racism, racism…you people are always talking about racism. Diverting the conversation from the real issues. Wrapped up in being ‘politically correct.’”

Charges of racism are so last-century. Political correctness is poisoning our students and putting our country at risk. Tolerance is not a virtue, but rather a sign of surrender to the enemy.

We should care about this. We should stand against this trend. We, Unitarian Universalists, have a history of exposing and challenging racist attitudes, no matter how unpopular the attempt. We, Unitarian Universalists, have a tradition of intentionally broadening our minds and hearts, risking, exposing our own ignorance to learn about those who are forced to the margins of society, in attempts that might well fall into the category of “politically correct” activities. We, Unitarian Universalists, count “tolerance” (along with “freedom” and “reason”) as foundational to our movement.

Marc Lynch writes in an article for Foreign Policy that while some, in the wake of the tragedy at Fort Hood, have blamed political correctness for compromising our security to the point that terrorists can infiltrate our own country, he finds that particular framing of the issue to be “almost 100% wrong. There is a connection between what these critics are calling ‘political correctness’ and national security,” he writes, “but it runs in the opposite direction.” Al-Qaeda, he says, is looking desperately for ways to move reasonable, tolerant, compassionate Muslims (the majority) who live in democratic societies to embrace al-Qaeda’s brand of violent fundamentalism. What better way than to force these democratic societies to be suspicious and afraid enough to enact oppressive policies toward Muslims as a whole? What better way than to prove that the freedoms, rights and acceptance that Americans profess to value so highly is simply a thin veneer covering prejudice, discrimination, and intolerance? To retain what some may call “political correctness,” Lynch argues, is to thwart al-Qaeda in their intentions, which will indeed make us safer.

But why talk about Muslims in a sermon on racism? Isn’t that about religion? Politics? Do me a favor…close your eyes for a moment and notice what comes to your mind when I ask you to picture a Muslim. How many picture a person of color?

Is it all about race? No, of course not. But I would feel extremely naïve if I didn’t admit that race played a role in attitudes toward Islam. Racism, as I said before, can rarely be isolated; it is one of many element in the mixture of attitudes, opinions, and beliefs.

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Laila Lalami, who wrote one of our readings, begins that article with a story of meeting a French writer at a literary festival who began their conversation by asking where Lalami was from. “Morocco,” she replied, after which “he put down his drink and stared at [her] with anthropological curiosity.” They proceeded to share a pleasant conversation about favorite writers, and the subject eventually turned to immigration. "If they were all like you, there wouldn't be a problem," he said. “Was this man really suggesting that I was a more desirable immigrant because I did not look Muslim?” she writes. “We had started our conversation as two equals, two potential friends, two writers discussing literature, but we had ended it as judge and supplicant--the former telling the latter whether or not she would make a suitable immigrant.”

Was the French writer racist? He probably would not think of himself as such. But encounters like this happen all the time, narrow assumptions hiding within the words and attitudes of well-intentioned people, and they often go unchallenged. Lalami writes, “[W]hy on earth did I not say something on the spot? Why did I not ask him what he meant? Instead, I had stared back at him with what I imagine was dumbfounded perplexity, and then changed the subject. Perhaps if I had confronted him I would have been able to remove the sting of the insult that had lain hidden inside the compliment.”

And though I have never had such comments directed at me, I have asked myself many times why I let racist comments, or racist assumptions, go unchallenged in conversations. Why try, I think…it probably wouldn’t change their minds. It probably wouldn’t matter to them. But of course it would matter, if only to me…if only to feel the courage of my convictions.

So where are we now? How do we move forward in truly facing and challenging racism?

A commentator pointed out that Obama may be even less able to confront racism than previous Presidents because, by being self-evidently multi-racial, by being African-American, he is also held in suspicion regarding his attitudes toward race; he is automatically suspected of having a built-in bias; he has to work extra hard to shake that stigma.

This is made even more apparent by his defenders.

Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multi-racial herself and has written extensively on multi-racial issues, says, “The interesting thing about Obama, I don’t think his racial identity is what makes him. This is someone who is charismatic, who has a number of skills. I think he's saying the truth when he says he wants to downplay race because I don't think the way he sees the world is related to his racial identity.”

Now I understand the intention here…I think. But what about the implications of such a statement, intended or not. Zack suggests that it is a matter of choice whether or not people let “racial identity” affect the way they see the world. Most will be defined by race, she seems to be saying, but the “interesting thing about Obama” is that his “racial identity” is not “what makes him.” “I don’t think the way he sees the world is related to his racial identity.” Really?? I wonder, then, how he could have given the speech on issues of race and racism in America, “A More Perfect Union.” It seems to me that his racial identity very powerfully informed that speech.

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I understand that he may have chosen not to let his racial identity determine how he sees the world; but she says that it is not even related to how he sees the world. Could he possibly choose to divorce one from the other? Can we possibly choose that? Should it even be a goal?

Let me ask you this: is your racial identity related to how you see the world? When I reflected on that question I had to admit, regardless of the fact that it is invisible to me most of the time because of the culture and communities that I live in, my racial identity is most definitely related to how I see the world. And the ironic thing, perhaps, is that once I can see that it’s related to how I see the world, it is much less likely to determine how I see the world. If I can recognize its influence, I am more free to choose whether to accept its influence.

Because racism operates at a much deeper level than our opinions; it flows beneath any intellectual explanation of an issue; it operates at that core level of humanity, so contrary to reason or logic that we say along with Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies, “How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!”

Strange and foolish those walls may be, but they are formidable nonetheless. And if we are to scale the walls; if we are to tear down the walls, we must first acknowledge their existence. We must dig deep into our own attitudes.

I can challenge immigration policies that are steeped in fear and misunderstanding, but I must also acknowledge the unwelcome twinge of fear in my own heart when I imagine being in the ethnic minority of a not-too-distant America. I can advocate for a greater understanding of Islam and the variety of ways it is practiced in people’s lives and also must acknowledge my deep aversion to its most fundamentalist and intolerant forms. I can challenge the racist attitudes of others, but I must also acknowledge my own irrational fear of “the other.” I can preach tolerance and understanding, but I must also acknowledge that these are not destinations at which I have arrived, but simply the road I choose to travel.

Tolerance, in its highest sense, in the sense that we have celebrated in our tradition, is hard work. It means risking awkwardness and ignorance as we seek to understand another. It means embarrassment and uneasiness as we expose some of our own assumptions in search of what is true. It means stretching to meet another, not waiting for them to come to us, to be like us, to meet us only on our terms.

It is hard work; and it is the only antidote to racism, discrimination, and oppression. It is tempting to think of racism as something we can eradicate once and for all; it is more realistic to address it as a disease that we can keep in check if we relate to one another in healthy ways. If we seek out understanding, nurture compassion, and reflect on the source of our own attitudes and opinions. If we practice tolerance.

“Liberal Tolerance is the long war, it's the long game,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, a contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine. “Liberal Tolerance bets on the future.”

And so may we. Bide the Wiccan laws ye must, in perfect love and perfect trust. Live and let live, fairly take and fairly give. Cast the circle thrice about to keep the evil spirits out. To bind the spell every time, let the spell be spake in rhyme. Soft of eye and light of touch; speak ye little, listen much. Deosil by the waxing moon, chanting out the Witches' Rune. When the Lady's moon is new, kiss the hand to her times two. When the moon rides at her peak, then you heart's desire seek. Heed the North wind's mighty gale, lock the door and drop the sail. When the wind comes from the South, love will kiss thee on the mouth. When the winds blow from the West, departed souls will have no rest. When the wind blows from the East, expect the new and set the feast. Nine woods in the cauldron go, burn them fast and burn them slow. Elder be your Lady's tree, harm it not or cursed you'll be. When the wheel has turned a Yule, light the log, the horned ones rule. Heed ye flower, bush and tree, by the Lady, blessed be. Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone and truth you'll know. When ye have a truly need, harken not to others greed. With a fool no season spend, nor be counted as his friend. Merry meet and merry part, bright the cheeks and warm the heart. Mind the three-fold law ye should, three times bad and three times good. When misfortune is anow, wear the blue star on thy brow. True in lover ever be, unless thy lover's false to thee. Lest in thy self-defense it be, ever mind the rule of three. Follow this with mind and heart and merry ye meet and merry ye part.

These eight words the Rede fulfill, an' ye harm none, do what ye will.

Wicca, Witches, Pagans and Pantheists

Why does “pagan” have such a negative ring to it in this culture? To answer this question I decided to look up the term of pagan in the dictionary, in order to find the answer. The term pagan means: one of a people or community observing a polytheistic religion, as the ancient Romans and Greeks and pertains to the worship or worshipers of any religion that is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Muslim. The negativity comes from the Christians who believe that they are the ONLY true belief in the world, and it is such a shame because there is so many beliefs and religions in the world.

Why do we think witches are scary? This started a long time along when King James rewrote the Bible and change the passage that said “ thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live” to though shalt not suffer a witch to live.” In order to keep the ancient people following the Bible, stories were created of an old woman, often portrayed with an evil appearance; sometimes called a "hag." She followed Lucifer or Satan, danced around the fire on a broomstick, did rituals, spoke curses, which was it was to injure or kill others. These stories were passed on to the children and more and more information was added until a witch was a very scary woman indeed. If you ask anyone about a witch, their eyes get large and they stutter…as you can see those stories have never died.

What is the true history of pagan, pantheist, and earth-centered religion? The history of Paganism began in about 10,000 BC, during the Paleolithic Age. It was a time when primitive people were nomadic, and had to hunt for their food, having to follow the herds of animals to survive. This is where the belief of the God of the hunt first appeared. The men worshipped the sun, the stag Horned God, and the language of the animals, as hunting was crucial to their survival. The women, who were the child bearers and the healers, those who took care of the tribe, and were looked upon as having more power, as they were the givers of life.

It was during this time, that the women discovered that their bodies were in tune with the lunar phases, and therefore they worshipped the moon, and the Goddess deity, and they were the ones who led the rituals. There were some men however, who stayed behind from the hunt, with the women, as they were old, or sick or injured. And the women, shared these lunar mysteries with these men, and this is how there became priests in the lunar cult.

Time went on, and people migrated from many places to settle in Rome, and those who came from Greece, came with many of the same beliefs that the Romans had....and though they worshipped different Gods and Goddesses, they shared in many similarities. Then came the people of the British Isles and these are what we know now to be the Celts. These people became the Druids, and they were the ones who oversaw all of the rites of the pagan people. The Druids were predominately men, with very few women.

In 6500-4500BC, there were still remnants of the solar/lunar cults that dealt with animals, herbs and the mysteries who intertwined in the pagan communities, and these people were known as the "wice" and they developed the power and understanding of life and the earth, and these were the keepers of the mysteries. So during this time of all these different people traveling back and forth and sharing information, three major groups of people developed, which were the Druids who mostly held the men’s mysteries of the Cult of the Dead, the Wice, who held the mystery teachings of the solar/lunar cults, which remained mostly matrifocal, and was made up of mostly woman, and who worshipped the Goddess, and the pagans, who were the common folk, who were balanced and sought out the wisdom and the knowledge of the Druids and the Wice.

In 0-650CE, the Old Testament was being written in the Middle East. After the death of Christ, the people from the Middle East spread out across the land, spreading the word of Christianity. Pagan temples were destroyed, and Christian churches were built upon the pagan holy grounds.

In 1494CE two Dominican monks, who were inquisitors of Papal Bull of Innocent the VIII, by the names of Kramer and Springer, produced the book, the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Witches Hammer" which laid the groundwork for the reign of terror that swept Europe well into the 18th century. This period was known as the "Burning Times" where it is estimated that 9 million men, women and children were held prisoner, stripped, starved, deprived of sleep for countless days on end, and horribly tortured beyond human comprehension, to obtain a confession of witchcraft, only than to be strangled or burned at the stake. Ironically, the Witches Hammer was originally rejected by the literary council because of bias and heresy, and was forged so that it could be printed. The last accused witch to die under the laws of the Witches Hammer was in 1747 in Australia.

All of those in the craft went underground for fear of persecution, until 1951, when the last of the anti-witchcraft laws were abolished in England.

It was at this time, that a man named Gerald Gardner came out from the underground and published his first book, called "High Magicks Aid" which he published as a fiction book, under his witch name of Scyer. Than in 1952, he published a non-fiction book, "WitchCraft Today" and thus began the New Age Religion of Wicca.

Wicca became a legalized religion in 1985, and has grown at a furious pace since than, in North American and Europe. An approximate number of pagans surpasses 750,000 in North American alone, and the number is believed to be much higher as many Pagans and Wiccans lie on their census forms for fear of modern day persecution which continues today. That was Zen; This is Tao Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 12/27/09

Reading 1. From The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff, pgs 97-99: Our religions, sciences, and business ethics have tried their hardest to convince us that there is a Great Reward waiting for us somewhere, and that what we have to do is spend our lives working like lunatics to catch up with it. Whether it’s up in the sky, behind the next molecule, or in the executive suite, it’s somehow always farther along than we are—just down the road, on the other side of the world, past the moon, beyond the stars…

A way of life that keeps saying, “Around the next corner, above the next step,” works against the natural order of things and makes it so difficult to be happy and good that only a few get to where they would naturally have been in the first place—Happy and Good—and the rest give up and fall by the side of the road, cursing the world, which is not to blame but which is there to help show the way. Those who think that the rewarding things in life are somewhere beyond the rainbow—

“Burn their toast a lot,” said Pooh.

2. From In This Very Moment: A Simple Guide to Zen Buddhism by James Ishmael Ford, pgs. 67-68: I think about driving through the countryside of southeast Wisconsin, on our way to a great marsh, allegedly the resting place of a hundred thousand migrating geese. Since we found no geese, our quest for the multitude of wild geese became our wild goose chase. A chase where we found nothing…As I reflect on it, I see our nothing was filled with somethings, all sorts of somethings. There was the drive itself, filled with out companionship, our conversations. There were the fading colors of late autumn and small lakes so incredibly blue they should defy all but the greatest artists…The sky was filled with another blue simply beyond my ability to word-paint. And clouds—the changing dance of each making my heart dance with them. We drove by people buying from outdoor vendors and farms with cows standing near fences, staring at us while chewing their cuds. Our nothing was filled with some-things, many precious and wonderful somethings…

I was just being with the cows and the pumpkin patches and the dry corn stalks filling the fields as we drove by. Nothing big, no big deal. Yet, it was a nothing allowing everything, a nothing that allowed joy.

Sermon That was Zen. This is Tao.

It’s a fun little phrase emblazoned on a bumper sticker on my old Corolla. It’s a take-off, obviously, on the phrase: That was then, this is now. And it takes on a whole new meaning to me as I grapple with the subject of this sermon.

First of all, I am faced with the paradox of trying to describe Zen and Tao with words--two traditions that are notoriously mistrustful of the capabilities of words to capture truth. “Existence,” says Lao-Tse in our Opening Words, “is beyond the power of words to define.” That was Zen; This is Tao UUCSEA 12/27/09 Richards / 2 of 5

But I am used to using words for just that task--defining. This is that, and that is this. That goes here, and this goes there. That is Zen, and this is Tao.

In my urge to define and categorize, I may start by saying Zen and Taoism are religions.

Zen is a form of Buddhism, right? Zen Buddhism. And since Buddhism is a religion, with particular teachings and rituals and practices, then Zen must be a religion.

Taoism, too, is practiced as a religion by many. It is, in part, according to some scholars, a response to Confucianism, another religion. And Taoism is associated with particular religious symbols (such as the Yin/Yang symbol), sacred texts (such as the Tao te Ching), and particular spiritual principles and virtues that help in one’s relationship with the world (such as Wu Wei, which is sometimes translated as without action or effortless doing). Thus, Taoism is a religion.

But while looking at Taoism and Zen as religions can be helpful in charting their histories and their various expressions throughout the world, we should not kid ourselves that such a perspective gives us their true flavors. When we think of religion, we think of belief systems; a particular cosmology; precepts that are accepted by faith. But neither Zen nor Taoism put much stock in beliefs. What you believe is far less important than what is. And, in fact, what you believe can keep you from encountering what is.

So, okay, maybe religion is not the right category. How about “schools of thought?” Zen and Taoism, maybe more philosophical than religious, provide particular ways to view the world. They are not bound by any particular creeds, but rather seek to explore the world from a particular perspective. They inspire us, not to believe, but to think about things.

Well, no. Again, neither is big on the importance of our thoughts. Thoughts are something one seeks to quiet; to detach oneself from; thoughts, rather than pointing one toward, often lead away from awareness.

So, okay, they’re about awareness. That’s it. Zen and Taoism are not best described as religions or schools of thought, but rather as paths to enlightenment.

Hmmm, a little better maybe, but Zen and Taoism both challenge the notion of goal-setting, too; of trying to get somewhere other than where we are; of “following paths.” Taoism advises us, rather than finding the path to enlightenment, to “get lost in the Tao.”

And so I, with my Western mind, eager to please, believing in the truths of Taoism, say yes, I would like to get lost in the Tao, so if you can just point me the way to the Tao, or show me on this map here where the Tao is, I will wander within it until I am lost. If you can just explain to me how I will recognize the Tao, I will know it when I see it and I will know I am on the right path toward getting lost within it.

And there are teachers who will do that, in both Zen and Taoism. They will point the way, and they will tell you what it is, but when I listen to them and just about the time I feel like I am making some progress, I hear Lao-Tse, the great Taoist teacher, say this:

The tao we call "tao" is not the Tao; That was Zen; This is Tao UUCSEA 12/27/09 Richards / 3 of 5

The name we call "Holy" is not the Holy Name.

We love to categorize and define things and I would love it if I could simply point and tell you: That was Zen and this is Tao. But it’s not that easy. A Zen master, a Taoist teacher, might say: It’s not that easy; it’s easier.

It’s easier than your complicated thoughts, your definitions, your descriptions, your words. They all take you away from what’s right there before you.

Alan Watts has written extensively on both Taoism and Zen, and he suggests that indeed Zen Buddhism, with its roots in China, owes as much to Taoism as Buddhism in the way that it approaches the nameless, the Tao. In a book entitled, The Way of Zen, he begins with a chapter on the Tao, and sheds some light on simplicity and complexity in our search for the Way.

It should be noted…that we call [life] complex as a result of trying to understand [it] in terms of linear thought, of words and concepts. But the complexity is not so much in [life] as in the task of trying to understand [it] by this means of thinking. It is like trying to make out the features of a large room with no other light than a single bright ray. It is as complicated as trying to drink water with a fork instead of a cup.

Watts points out that finding out what Zen and Taoism are about cannot be done in our usual thought- heavy, comparative-religion, academically-philosophical ways. The desire is to make Taoism and Zen into things of some kind that we can describe and put on a shelf next to other similar things. But if we see them only as things (religions, philosophies, schools of thought, paths) we will miss what they have to offer us as processes.

Alan Watts again:

In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs—so that one who thinks Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

And the precepts of Taoism and Zen tell me that we often stifle the natural processes that make up our lives with our thoughts, our ambitions, our opinions, our fears, our actions and our efforts. We belittle those things that we do naturally.

Breathing, right? Who can’t do that? Yet, Zen places great value on just that: breathing. People learn to breathe in a certain way; count their breaths; follow their breaths; breathing provides a way to awareness.

We judge the value of an action in proportion to the amount of effort we put into it. How hard did we try? What did we need to overcome? Yet Taoism lifts up the principle of Wu Wei: effortless doing. How do we work in harmony with what is rather than struggle against it? What if we strove to be rather than to do? And what if we found out we could get there by not striving?

Taoism and Zen turn the Big Pronouncements of Western Religion on their head, promising no Great Reward up ahead, around the next corner, if we’re good enough or smart enough or pious enough or That was Zen; This is Tao UUCSEA 12/27/09 Richards / 4 of 5 ambitious enough. They promise, rather, what Unitarian Universalist minister James Ishmael Ford found in the midst of his wild goose chase: Nothing big, no big deal. Just cows and pumpkin patches and sky and dry corn stalks and nothing, really…but a nothing that allowed everything.

Taoism and Zen turn the Big Metaphors of Western Religion on their head, promising not to fill us up with love or with God or with anticipation or with faith, but rather to empty us; to create more space within us; to help us understand that all the somethings are really nothing, and that it is only the nothing that allows us to be aware of something.

An earnest student of religion comes to a teacher to learn Zen. The teacher invites him to have some tea. The student tells the teacher of his studies, elaborating on all of the details of the philosophies and beliefs, while the master pours tea. And continues to pour…and continues to pour…the cup is soon full, then overflowing onto the table. “Stop! The cup is full! It won’t hold any more tea,” cries the student. “If you want me to show you Zen,” says the teacher, “you must first empty your cup.”

But how do we empty ourselves? How do we break the thought-habit that seeks to complicate and accumulate rather than simplify and detach? How do we enter into awareness rather than assessment?

Well, it turns out that we may take a tip from the cows that showed up earlier. Just as they showed up in the reading from James Ishmael Ford as part of the somethings that populated the nothing that allowed for joy, they also entered through a less apparent door.

But before I tell you how, let me ask you: what is the sound that a cow makes? Moooo. Yes, well, and a cow who speaks succinctly might say, simply: Moo. Right? Okay, hold onto that thought.

A direct realization of emptiness and interdependence is absolutely necessary in Zen, says Ford. It is sometimes revealed through meditation, just sitting. It is also sometimes found in koans. Koans take the form of stories; single questions; unexpected answer. Koans, says Ford, are often misunderstood. They are not meant to be stories with morals, teaching tales, per se. They are not riddles that test our cleverness. They are not meant to be answered, and they do not tell us about enlightenment so much as they attempt to shock us, to rip away our assumptions about any answers.

One of the most famous koans is the simple question: What is the sound of one hand clapping? We have turned that into a puzzle. (Is it really clapping if it’s only one hand?) We have turned it into a joke. (This is the sound of one hand clapping.) We let our minds run and our thoughts get tangled up in knots. Questions are meant to be answered, we think, and the answer will lead us to something. But that’s not Zen, and that’s not Tao.

Another famous koan illustrates this as it does provide an answer (of sorts).

A monk asks Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?”

Now let me stop here for a moment. In classical Buddhism, this has an obvious answer: yes. According to Buddhism, all things have Buddha nature, true nature.

So in this koan (which seems to have a predictable conclusion), the monk asks Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?” That was Zen; This is Tao UUCSEA 12/27/09 Richards / 5 of 5

Chao-chou answers, “Mu.”

Mu. Was he imitating a cow? Well, knowing the playful and sly Zen masters, that is not out of the realm of possibility. But, as it turns out, “mu” is a Japanese word that means “no.” But from what I can gather, it is not the “no” that is the opposite of “yes.” It is more like “no answer.” One writer describes it as a way of “unmasking the question.” No answer because that’s not what’s important. No answer because you will then be under the mistaken impression that you’ve gained something. No answer because an answer to your question will just lead you further toward an illusory goal of learning your way to the truth. Mu. No. No answer. No question anymore. No thought. No Zen. No Tao. That was Zen. This is Tao. That was when. This is now. And now is all there is…not the concept of now, just now.

So I invite you, in the face of the big questions, to “mu.” I invite you, in the spirit of Tao and Zen, of now and then, of how and when, to “mu.” While we are urged to “live the questions,” what would happen if we unasked the questions themselves? If we respond with a “mu.” What would we be left with then? Nothing?

Perhaps. Perhaps the nothing that allows everything… (Don’t) sign here When Maine voters recently repealed a law that would have allowed same-gender marriage, spokespeople said that the vote defended “the common-sense definition of marriage.” “Common sense,” however, can simply be a cover for unexamined assumptions. And, if we truly want to define marriage, we first have to clear up some confusion. The heated debate surrounding the appropriate definition of marriage has to do with the fact that we use a single word to describe two separate things. That confusion begins at the wedding ceremony. If a clergy person is presiding over the ceremony (and signing the marriage license), there are really two weddings going on: a religious ceremony and a legal proceeding. In 2005, I had the great honor and privilege of performing a wedding ceremony for two good friends of mine, two women, who wanted to make a public and celebratory expression of their commitment to one another. In that ceremony, I said: Marriage is the outward token of an inward union of minds and hearts which religions may consecrate and the state may legalize, but which these ceremonies can neither enforce nor destroy. Religions may (or may not) consecrate a marriage. The state may (or may not) legalize a marriage. The important thing to note is that these are two separate actions and that the confusion of one with another has led to the denial of civil rights to particular couples. Because many religious institutions choose not to consecrate marriages of two people of the same gender, the state (Arizona, for example) has chosen not to legalize marriages of two people of the same gender. I confess to having contributed to such confusion in my role as minister by acting as an agent of the state in signing marriage licenses, a legal document. I seek to make a small step in correcting that confusion by no longer signing civil marriage licenses. I would like to invite all religious leaders who are granted this authority by the state to join me in no longer signing civil marriage licenses. Wherever you may fall on the issue of same-sex marriage, this would end an unfortunately confusing comingling of church and state. I, in my capacity as a Unitarian Universalist minister, will continue to perform wedding ceremonies for committed couples, and happily so, whether or not the state deems them worthy of a contract. (Those who qualify may then have a civil ceremony for little or no charge where a justice of the peace, a government employee, will sign their marriage license: a legal contract.) I will uphold the rights of any religious community to define marriage in whatever way they choose. But such definitions should not affect the civil rights of same-sex couples as they seek legal recognition of their marriages. In the meantime, I hope that others who are privileged to be leaders in their religious communities will join me in clarifying the difference between religious marriage and civil marriage. Such a clarification can only protect the integrity of both. The Rev. Rod Richards is pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona. He can be e-mailed at [email protected] [1].