I want to talk about emotions in us animals today: love, attachment, and grieving, passions from the heart of life. This is an area where it’s easy to find religious stories, fables, myths and children’s stories talking about these things, because they’re so important to us. You think of a saying like “God is Love,�? “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,�? or Jesus’ saying that the quality of your faith is judged by how you treat “the least among you,�? whatever group that happens to be for you.

 Those are messages from the heart of life: life telling us what it needs from us. We too can set life free. Within and around us, we can set life free.

Originally delivered by Dr. Loehr on January 28, 2007

 Text of the sermon may be found at
http://www.austinuu.org/site/index.php?page=animal-stories-part-3-the-heart-of-life

When the foundations of our Western religion were laid, when Yahweh, the main God of the ancient Hebrews, was created a few thousand years ago, he was created specifically to oppose the nature deities of the Canaanite culture in which the ancient Hebrews originated.

The Canaanites saw us as absolutely embedded in nature, because they were farmers. The Hebrews were sheep-herders, and created a religion that pretended we had no deep connection with nature at all, only with their God, who was created as a kind of tribal chief.

Yet we are profoundly children of nature. And that means that some of the biases in our religions have profoundly misidentified us and misled us. The real ground of our being is in our deep relationships with all other life on earth, and with the earth itself, not with authoritative voices from on high, or wishful and distracting poetry.

That’s why I think it’s worth trying to take a more serious look at who we are and where we came from, because Life knows a lot. There are a lot of deep and clear patterns that can help show us who we are, what we need, what we love, and how we can live more fulfilled lives.

So I want to look at some of the things life seems to know, by looking at some animal stories – today, stories from monkeys and the two apes who are our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos, plus a few stories about dogs, elephants, bulls and pigs.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on January 21st, 2007.

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://www.austinuu.org/site/index.php?page=animal-stories-part-2-the-mind-of-life

During November I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, and visited with Frans de Waal, the primatologist who heads the center. I had read all of his books, and wanted to talk with him about animal behavior, morality and religion. During our talks, he said It isn’t possible that religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the rest of our intellectual disciplines could tell us much that’s very deep or profound about who we are. They’re simply too new! (Frans de Waal)

Think of it this way. If the time since the Big Bang is condensed into one year, then Cro Magnon – the first recognized human – has been here about one minute. One minute out of the 525,960 minutes in a year (365.25 days). And the 4,000 years of our recorded history, including the birth of all our existing religions and the invention of their gods, go back just one one-millionth of the way to the origins of life four billion years ago. Why would we think that stories invented in the last one-millionth of the year of Life could know or tell us much about who we are, how we came to be this way and how we should live? Four thousand years is only about two hundred generations. Yet “A hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them.�? (Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992, p. 5) There is obviously a lot that was written in nature before we appeared.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on January 14th, 2007.

Text can be read online at
http://www.austinuu.org/site/index.php?page=animal-stories-part-1-older-than-god

Introduction: They say confession is good for the soul – if you believe in a soul. I used to wear camel’s hair and eat wild locusts and honey. No, that’s not my confession. That’s my attire during this period in my life to which I am about to confess. When your head ends up on a platter and you’re not a pig, you’ve done something that probably warranted the loss of your head.

I spoke truth to power. Big mistake. Power will put your head in a place where it can’t speak any more.

I made enemies in high places. Herod’s steward, Kooza, the man who ran Herod’s house was married to, Joanna, one of my disciples. Well, she would have been one of my disciples if that upstart Jesus hadn’t come along. He got the leavings from my table.

Originally delivered on January 7th, 2007 by Jack Bonham-Harris.

The text of the sermon can be read online at
http://www.austinuu.org/site/index.php?page=baptism-by-fire