A sermon title like "Spiritual Aeronautics" is such an ambitious name. It could almost cover a year's worth of classes in religion. I was thinking what a very small part of that I'm really trying to work with in these two weeks, and thought that maybe borrowing some concepts from Hinduism might clarify what I can and can't hope to do here.

Hinduism has four different paths, or disciplines, or yogas, to fit four very different kinds of people, because we have different styles of being spiritual. Jnana yoga is salvation or wholeness through understanding, insight. That's closest to our Western intellectual religious traditions, including Unitarians. Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and love, and we have tried to include a bit of that path with the many candles in the windows. Karma yoga is the path of action or works, like the people here who are more interested in social action than sermons. And Raja yoga is the meditative path of insights into your own soul's divine nature, which we don't really do here as a group.

But of the four paths, the first one is the one most characteristic of Unitarians. Salvation, wholeness, through understanding, through a more complete kind of knowledge. What do we think we believe and what kind of coherence do those beliefs have in our life and the world we're living in? Those are the kinds of questions behind what I'm trying to do with you this morning.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 28 March 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

34:57

© Davidson Loehr 2004

It is not unusual for me to find in life that what causes religious reflection for me often comes from very unexpected sources. And this time, the main catalyst came from the television comedy, Scrubs. In one scene, the main character, J.D., is daydreaming about a visit to a friend's church. I don't remember too much about the scene, except that in ending the worship service, the very charismatic minister turns to the gathered congregation and says, "I love you, and there's nothing you can do about it."

In our modern expression of Unitarian Universalism, I often hear us talk about some things as if they were inevitable - unavoidable. We talk about the inevitability of truth or sometimes the fact of an ever growing complexity and diversity in life. We speak of inevitable knowledge and understanding that comes with experience. But what I don't often hear described as unavoidable, what I don't often hear is talk of this type of irresistible love, one that would say, "I love you, and there's nothing you can do about it."

However, running through the core of our tradition, deep within the DNA of our religious heritage, is the understanding that a profound, mature love has the power to break so many barriers. In 1568, the first (and only) Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund of Transylvania, enacted the first recorded law of religious toleration in a nation's history. While this law included all varieties of the Christian religion only, it was a radical move at the time. He was counseled by his Unitarian court minister, Francis David, who is famously quoted as saying, "We need not think alike to love alike." But what is it that we love?

...Our misplaced love can make gods out of money or power, can have us chasing after status or esteem; our highest loyalty and love can easily be paid to the shabby deities of a flag or tribe. Like Emerson and so many before him, he knew that as humans, we will worship something, but that our ultimate love should be directed toward the most ultimate things possible. What/whom is it that we love?

Originally delivered by Aaron White on August 17, 2008

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Aaron White 2008

20:08

It isn't easy writing a statement of what you believe. Then when you've written one, then look at how you're living, it seems to leave out so much of what really drives you. It isn't easy.

And one reason it isn't easy, as ironic as this sounds, is because we have already inherited the words and the styles in which we're supposed to be thinking of our beliefs. In our culture, beliefs are supposed to involve God, sin, and salvation, even if we don't think of our lives that way. And not any god, either. Just that one taken from the religious scriptures of Jews and Christians.

If we say "Well, I don't think God is a useful concept, I think in terms of trying to be awake rather than living in illusions" - if we say that, we'll be made to feel that we haven't done it right, that we didn't use the right materials, even though it would be a perfectly good Buddhist statement.

We've inherited this set of religious luggage we're supposed to use. One suitcase says "God" and is filled with over 25 centuries of traditions, poetry, fantasy, feeling, wisdom and nonsense, all packed in that suitcase under the word "God."

Another suitcase may be called Sin, and it too is loaded with centuries' worth of stories, a lifetime of personal experiences, the teachings of our childhood church, our classmates, and the low-level religion we see in the media. It isn't a neutral word; it comes to us already packed with other peoples' meanings.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 21 March 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

34:54

© Davidson Loehr 2004

This morning I want to take an insight from those great seldom recognized philosophers of our society. Those in the world of professional wrestling. They have a distinction that I think might be useful and helpful in thinking about balderdash.

In the world of professinal wrestling they divide the whole world into two categories which they call "The Smarts" and "The Marks". The Marks are those who actually think that professional wrestling is an athletic contest and wonder who will win. The smarts know that what they are seeing is a loosly scripted, highly choreographed physical art form like a sweaty soap opera. Both the smarts and the marks can enjoy the wrestling, but they are enjoying fundamentally different shows...

Originally delivered by Dr. Davidson Loehr on July 15, 2001

31:58

© Davidson Loehr 2001

One of religion's oldest pronouncements is "The Love of Money is the root of all evil." I think that is too simple....

Originally I was going to talk today about economics in a kind of sequel to my last fall's sermon on "The Dark God of Capitalism", but I got sidetracked by Bill Moyers two-hour special "Trade Secrets". It was about the secret rules that have governed the chemical industry for a long time.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 1 April 2001

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

29:12

© Davidson Loehr 2001

The voices are everywhere. They are the priests and priestesses of the religion of salvation, American style. I want to convince you this morning that it really is a religion, that it's a very bad religion, and that the alternatives are not hard to find.

Now you're a very bright group, and I doubt that any of you are convinced yet. You think I'm exagerrating for effect, or to set up something in a few minutes. You don't think I really mean that commercials represent a real religion in America. But I do. And by the end of the morning, you may too.

I'm not just picking on television programs, though most of them are silly, too full of sex, violence and vacuousness. But picking on sit-coms is too easy. I want to argue that all of television exists primarily to serve The Voices that are selling us this religion of salvation, American style. I even want to argue that news programs aren't really about news that matters, or that we need to know for any reason. Instead, they are entertainment shows, and their primary purpose is to attract an audience through their sensationalist stories of blood, violence, sex and gossip, so The Voices can make their pitch to this crowd. I want to argue that television programs, and television news, both exist almost entirely to serve the real God behind the television industry. And that God's name is Our Sponsor, Who Art in Heaven.

Why are there so many news programs on? Thirty years ago, there was only about fifteen minutes of national news a night, and it seemed to be enough. Why is there now an entire CNN network with news 24 hours a day? Is there that much that we need to know, or about which our knowledge could make any difference at all?

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr 17 September 2000

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

32:54

© Davidson Loehr 2000

This is the story of a woman who wanted to serve God by helping people. She did it, felt the presence of God, and was happy. But then something odd and I think tragic happened. She answered a new call, which took her in a different direction. She followed this new call for 49 years, becoming one of the most famous women in the world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, winning a Nobel Prize and the adoration of nearly the whole world. But she lost her soul in doing it, because she was no longer serving a God who could make her or anyone else whole. That's my understanding of what happened to this sainted woman, after reading the controversial and disturbing new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, just published a few months ago, and containing for the first time some of her private writings.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 2 December 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr

31:47

I've spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He's writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others. This is also what I've been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us. We're Number One.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 25 November 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2007

29:39

You know, we meet here in this liberal church, along with about 1/10th of one percent of Austin's population, and we can do honest religion, can talk about high ideals like character, can attack selfish behavior as the cardinal sin of all great religions. We can insist that all beliefs should be open to questioning, because honest religion is one of the highest callings we can have. It's one of the best hopes we have of evolving beyond the "chimpanzee politics" of power that is sought for selfish ends, and the rest of it. And it's all true.

But it can also be pretty na�ve. Because outside the walls of this place, across our country and around the world, what the vast majority of people associate with the word "religion" has been and continues to be responsible for immense harm to millions upon millions of humans and other species. And if we just do our liberal thing and remain silent about the horrific abuses of religion, we become silent accomplices to the things done in the name of religion and its gods the world over.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 14 October 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2007

29:58

...We are embodied spirits. I agree with the mystics on that: we aren't primarily bodies; we're primarily spirits, wearing bodies.

Honest religion, the theme of the sermons this fall, is a phrase with two words. Honesty is easy enough to do if you're not afraid of crossing other people's comfort zones or boundaries of orthodox thinking. But also to be religious means we must be concerned about seeing and saying the highest ideals to which we can aspire. Not because God commands us to, but because those ideals help define the healthiest and most deeply fulfilling life and world. And the highest of the spirits is, as nearly all religions have said, a spirit of compassion and love for others, that can over-ride smaller and more self-serving ambitions. The Catholic Church, and after them almost all of Christianity, calls it the Holy Spirit, and that seems the right name for it. St. Augustine wrote in the early 5th century that the great gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift enabling you to love others as yourself - and that if you didn't get that gift, you didn't get much.

Even though the idea of one single holy spirit vastly oversimplifies how complex we and our many spirits really are, it's useful for speaking not about the spirit but about our own longing for the sense of peace that could come from stilling our quarrelling voices, of raising our own selfishnesses to the higher level of equal concern and compassion for others. You can find this yearning expressed simply and poignantly in some of the great religious poetry. Here's just one line from a famous Catholic prayer called "Come, Holy Spirit". See if you can't feel the yearning from which this prayer could come: "Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love." Don't you wish it were that easy!

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on September 30th, 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr

31:53

What I'm doing in the three sermons this month is a kind of Unitarian heresy because I'm revisiting the idea of a trinity. The 19th century Unitarians rightly rejected the notion of a supernatural trinity, where the man Jesus was physically fathered by a sky god, and the Holy Spirit was an actual presence connected with God and Jesus. That is superstition, and not very interesting. But as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries, some of the best Christian thinkers had been defining the trinity as a psychological concept rather than a supernatural one - and that's both more interesting and more universal. So that's what I'm looking at this month.

It's still probably easier to understand this three-part idea by looking at the Buddhist version. They also see religion or life divided into three different but complementary arenas, which they call Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. "Buddha" means a source of insight and wisdom. We need a source of insight into the human condition and wisdom about living well. You can call that God, or Buddha, Allah, Science or Reason - or you can just call it Truth or Goodness or other abstractions. We need something there, and something that will stand up to our toughest questions and most personal needs.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on September 23 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr

25:55

The fundamental human failing noted by all religions I know about is the sin of selfishness. If we're to evolve beyond our closest relatives the chimps, we have to do it psychologically, politically and culturally, because human cultures move much faster than biological evolution can adapt to.

At their best, religions are about helping us evolve beyond chimpanzee politics. They are about expanding the sense of who we are and what we're here to serve. This runs throughout human history, going back at least 2500 years. For Confucius, living well meant living for one's largest sense of self, which meant that we need to see ourselves as small parts of the much larger social world, the whole society. We need to expand our sense of "self" beyond ourselves. Then we should act in ways that serve that larger self.

In Western religions, that larger horizon is called "God." Most people use the word God as though there were a critter somewhere above the sky, a guy, a big fellow who watched, heard us, could make good or evil things happen to us, much like the god Zeus from ancient Greek religions. But that's not honest religion, and it's not useful. For the best thinkers in all religious traditions, the word "God" is not the name of a critter; it's a symbol, a symbol of that highest creative horizon we can visualize. And it doesn't matter what we call that larger horizon - whether we call it God or something else - as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our lives and our behaviors. That's what we're about here: trying to call forth that larger sense of who we are, and lure ourselves into it. That's what all honest religion is about.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 16 September 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2007

33:28

The abiding religious questions are Who am I really? and How should I live? All religions have tried to express profound answers to these two questions that define us in grand, even mythic, terms. We have a Buddha-seed within us that wants to grow. We are children of God, the latest reincarnation of Life's longing for itself, the sons and daughters of the universe, made of stardust, and so on. In other words, we are fundamentally precious, part of an infinite reality, embraced by symbols like the Buddha, God, Life and the universe.

And the way we should live follows from that. Religions teach that we should live in ways that are worthy of our most deep and noble identity. We should see ourselves as integral parts of all life, and walk in paths of compassion, love for all, gratitude for being here, and all the rest of the lovely poetry long used to welcome us into a larger identity, into the hopefully useful and even necessary story of whatever religious community we have claimed.

The argument behind this series of sermons on "animal stories" is that in some ways, religions are just too new to offer many deep or accurate pictures of who we really are or how we should live. The gods involved in today's world religions were only created a few thousand years ago. The deeper story is the story of life itself, the life that produced us along with millions of other species, the life that links us biologically, genetically, and emotionally.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on March 18th 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermon/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

30:47

Frans de Waal, who has studied chimps for over thirty-five years, wrote a book on this in 1982, which has become a classic in its field. Called Chimpanzee Politics, it's based on thousands of hours of observations of a chimpanzee colony in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, where De Waal first began studying one of our two closest relatives.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described chimpanzee politics over 350 years ago, as "a general inclination of all [mankind], a perpetual and restless desire of Power after Power, that ceases only in Death." He was actually speaking of human politics, but his words describe male chimpanzee politics perfectly.

When De Waal wrote his book, he was accused of anthropomorphizing chimpanzees: projecting human motives onto them. But he said it actually worked in reverse. After studying chimpanzee politics, he began to see human politics in a fundamentally different way. That's what happened to me, too: I've come out of this with very different, and much lower, expectations for human politics.

Chimpanzee politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females - or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years. Then there's another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader - or as we call them, elections.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on Sunday, March 11th, 2007

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermon/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

32:19

The word "seduction" is an interesting word. Most people are surprised to learn that it has the same root as the word "education," as well as induction, deduction, conduction and abduction. The root, "-duc," means "to lead." The prefixes tell you how and where you're being led. So education means to be led out of yourself and brought up into something bigger. Induction is to be led into something - like the Hall of Fame, or the Army. Conduction means to be led through something, like electricity through a wire, and so on. And seduction means to be led astray: led astray to be used for someone else's agenda, at your expense. It's an especially tacky form of deception.

There are tons of stories of seduction and deception. They're some of our favorite plots. Think of the Trojan Horse, where the Greeks gave the Trojans the gift of this big carved wooden horse. But after the Trojans brought it into the walled city, at night a bunch of armed soldiers climbed down from inside the horse and destroyed the city. That's what seduction is like. You're taken in thinking you'll get something you want, then learn too late that you were just taken to the cleaners, used, robbed or worse.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 25 February 07

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermon/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

32:27

The purpose of this series of animal stories is to do two things. First is to say that our evolutionary story as animals, related to all other life on earth, is the oldest, deepest and most adequate framework for understanding who we are, both good and bad. The second purpose is to say that we can also find in this story better clues than we can find through religion, philosophy, psychology or any other cultural creation on how we should live, what we owe to other life and to the future. I'm suggesting that we can answer the two most basic religious questions - Who are we, and How should we live - in empowering and challenging ways from within the oldest life story of all: the story of life on earth, of which we are a part but not the pinnacle.

In the first four parts, I've shared animal stories showing that many of our higher moral abilities have roots millions of years old. Our need for connection with others, our empathy, our ability to care for other life - all this can be found, to small or large extent, in species going back a hundred million years or more.

So why, if we're so great, is the world in such a mess? And why are we still trying to figure out who we are and how we should live? The next few weeks we'll look at this from a few different angles. Today I want to go back to some of the roots of our empathy to find that those roots contain both what is most promising and what is most problematic. We are born both good and evil, capable of being either a brave blessing or a cowardly curse to others. Not all of it is good, but it's all natural.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 18 February 07

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

35:46

The ability to sense another's feelings, needs, fears, and act on them is the greatest blessing we can offer to life. And when we hear of someone who seems to lack that ability to sense another's hurt, or to care - it is almost an affront to humanity.

We live in troubled and quite brutal times, but I want to see us as part of an ancient and noble heritage of life that cares about and responds to the feelings, fears and needs of other life. I want to remind us of our deep animal heritage, and to empower us by giving us some animal stories to take with us.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 11 February 07

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

34:22

This was the first time I'd heard the Chichester Psalms. But when Brent told me about the music, and then when I read the Psalms from which Bernstein took his lyrics, I recognized one of Bernstein's greatest and most unusual gifts as a composer. He made a space for a huge variety of voices in his greatest works. The voices don't agree and aren't squeezed into a forced and phony kind of harmony. Instead, they are presented as a slice of life without a simple and clear solution....

...The range of voices we have in Unitarian churches is immense. And like the voices in Bernstein's works, they are not resolved: they're in proximity, but not necessarily in harmony, on a huge range of topics.

A couple months ago, we learned what a wide range of opinions we have on 9-11. I believe our government either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. Some others agreed. Still others thought that was an absolutely crazy idea, that our government could do such a thing. Others were somewhere in between, and others - perhaps the majority - don't spent time thinking about who did 9-11 or how, because there are just too many other things going on in their lives that demand and deserve more attention.

But the whole range of voices exists here, as it does throughout the country and the world. No matter what you believe about 9-11, you know there are people sitting around you who don't agree with you. And those different beliefs aren't going to be harmonized. They exist here in proximity but not in harmony, and that's one of the frustrating things about liberal churches - or any honest church. We live in a world with people who sometimes disagree violently with us on really important matters, and the challenge of civilization is the challenge to learn to live together creatively.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 9 April 2006

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2006

25:35

In one of the shortest sermons ever delivered, and one of the most famous, the Buddha said "All I do is sit by the river, selling river water."

I think it's one of the most profound revelations of the secret of nearly all wisdom: that nothing is hidden, that we just need to be reminded of things we already knew, so that perhaps this time we will awaken, and act.

We had two fairly large memorial services here this week. Both of them filled this room. And in both of them, I said something I say at almost every memorial service. I say I wish more people came to memorial services. Because if they did, and if they heard the memories and stories people get up to tell about the person who has died, they would realize that we know exactly what is right and wrong, good and bad. We know exactly how a noble life is to be judged. Not by might, arrogance, wealth or intimidation, but by the kinds of things every religion has always preached: compassion, understanding, peace, love. We don't really fool people. That's the river water, and every good preacher makes their living by selling it.

So as we're going to talk a little about the American myths this morning, I need to say that we can talk about them, but you already know what's wrong with them, and how life would look if we were living it more wisely. That's the river water, and all I'm going to do here is bottle some for you to take with you. So let's begin.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 01 May 2005
Affirmation of faith - Hillary Hutchinson

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

33:35

© Davidson Loehr 2005

One of the most important and most neglected facts of life are the stories we live in, the stories that assign us our roles and identities, our social and economic status, our worth. And if there's a single sin we fall into more than any other, it may be the failure to claim a role in writing the stories of our lives, our relationships, our country, and our world. It's my candidate for our real original sin.

When I first began baking bread years ago, a friend gave me a recipe for a bread she loved. She knew it so well, she just wrote it out on some notepaper for me. The bread was so bad you couldn't eat it. I invited her over, gave her a piece of it and the recipe she had written out. She took one bite, made an awful face, looked at the recipe, and said "Oh, I left out the salt!" I knew what the recipe said, and I followed it, but I forgot that someone first wrote it down, and may have left something out, without which the whole recipe was ruined.

All our stories have those same three steps. The first step, which we usually forget like I did, is that in the beginning, somebody wrote the recipe, the story. The second step is that we read or hear the story, and think we have learned how things are, what's true, what's important, and who we are and what we are to do. The third step is doing it, playing our role, acting out our assigned part in this story that reflects the way things are, the way God or the State or someone else wants them.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 1 February 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2004

29:51

My favorite philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once cautioned a student not to get too familiar with sacred things, to grant them a respectful distance. In part, it's because of the great power of sacred things, the great spirit in them - and the fact that while you think you're playing with them, they may take your measure.

I was reminded of this again by this sermon topic, combined with two events in the news the past weeks. Sermon topics can be planned carefully in advance, but then sometimes current events will intervene, which must be addressed. Then the sermon topic modulates to a key in which thought about the topic and the current events can both be addressed. That's what happened this week.

The first was the super-hyped release of Mel Gibson's movie on his peculiar version of the Passion. The second was President Bush's equally embarrassing move to write discrimination and bigotry into an American Constitution revered the world over for its inclusive freedoms. And all these things have to do with the high cost of using sacred and noble words, words like God, country, justice, truth and love, in low, mean or inadequate ways.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 29 February 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

28:45

© Davidson Loehr 2004

Today I want to offer you some high expectations and a challenge.

A critique offered twenty years ago to UU seminary students from a very wise Lutheran minister, Joseph Sittler. At that time he was around 80 and nearly blind. He observed that Unitarians had many great qualities but we hadn't yet found what we were seeking.

He said, "You have some deep hungers that haven't been filled." When asked how he could tell he said, "I know what happens when religious people find what they're seeking." "The best of them get filled to overflowing, and the world around them is nourished by the overflow." "When that happens even an old blind man will be able to see it."

If this church were accused of having a faith that made a positive difference in the larger world around us would there be enough evidence to convict us? I'm not sure there would.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 22 August 2004

27:46

© Davidson Loehr 2004

Compassion is a subject the Buddhists probably do better than any other religion. It's the central aim and attitude of the religion, even its great secret. They have hundreds of things they call "metta" meditations. "Metta" is a word that means "friendship" or "loving-kindness." They sound simple but they're not.

...It sounds like the kind of thing little groups of New Agey people might sit around saying, and grooving on how marvelously compassionate they all felt. But it isn't a Hallmark card; it's only easy if you've never tried to do it. It's part of a discipline as high and as difficult as any in world religions.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 8 February 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

35:23

©Davidson Loehr 2004

When I was 21, trying to sort things out, I went to see my minister. I told him I was seeing a psychologist, but wanted to talk to him too. I asked what the difference was between what he did and what my psychologist was trying to do. "All I can do," he said, "is try to help you understand the gods you are serving, and whether they are worth serving." All these years later, I'm not sure that what we do can be put any better than that.

Years later, in Divinity School, I learned how hollow the traditional God-language of Western religion has become even among people who know it well, and how incapable it is of truly binding together our whole pluralistic world. The students who clung most tightly to the old language formulas could not explain what they meant by any of them. They were saying what they had been told to say, going through the motions as though it were still, perhaps, the 18th century. But when they got clearer about what they actually believed, it was never traditional, seldom systematic or very cosmic. A few stories here and there that they used to get them through. They planned to take the old stories to their parishioners in the faith that somehow they might work better for them than they did for their minister. And stories do have that power; they can awaken hope and meaning sometimes.

But mostly, we have no deep or nuanced knowledge of even our own Western religious stories. Mostly today, we have lost the names and stories of our gods. We aren't sure what to call the forces of life within and around us: those forces, which sustain us.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 7 March 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

33:55

© Davidson Loehr 2004

There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human - since that's the only category there is for us. Calling him a "son of God" was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don't like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god - and neither did they.

I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or "faces." One aspect was useless, a second - the most "magical" - was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 23 May 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

38:03

Now there are these people in this wilderness, this land that doesn't feel much like a home, and their leader is taken up to the top of a mountain and given a wonderful vision of a land where all the different peoples have become one in a land of milk and honey.

This is not your run-of-the-mill view, this view from Mt. Nebo. It is not one seen from down below. The people of Gilead don't see it, nor the people of Judah, nor Moses's own people.

Their visions are so much more limited. They are just trying to survive down there, and all those other people are in their way. They each have their own small territories, their own cities of darkness, and they cluster together there in their tight little knots, to protect their flanks.

But this one man is given a view almost beyond belief. Some day, he is told, this land will be a place where enemies have learned to be friends, war has given way to peace, and the people are at last one.

Then he is told: oh, by the way-you'll never live to see this. Long before the fractious nature of the world ends, you will end. Now go back and tell your people about this vision of the Promised Land you'll never live to see. Make them believe it, help them to seek it. Maybe they will live to see what is beyond the reach of your own lifetime....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 26 December 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

25:56

© Davidson Loehr 2004

This Holy Cross Sunday Dr. Leohr focuses on the Christian symbol of the cross seen in a new way: As two axis, one horizontal and one vertical.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 14 September 2003

37:24

© Davidson Loehr 2003

164 years ago, a great German theologian wrote that all the attributes of the gods are the things that we happen to admire, and we project them onto the gods we have created in the same way that we project noble ideals onto our race or our country.

And 206 years ago another theologian who was this man's teacher wrote that religion is a purely human invention, designed to help us become most fully human. It was, he added, our most important of human inventions, when it worked.

Every "reformation" in the history of religion, every instance of higher thinkers correcting the theological errors of lower thinkers, is an example of we who are the true owners of our highest ideals reclaiming them from misuse by those who speak for the churches.

This means that we have some serious work to do.

The sermon was originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 02 January 2005
An affirmation of faith was delivered by Worship Associate Carolyn Gremminger

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

35:32

© Davidson Loehr 2005

Some of you have found this church through Beliefnet.com. You took the quiz on the website to see which faith your profile resembled, and found you were closest to Unitarian Universalist, or perhaps to Secular Humanist, sometimes Quaker, in some order of the three. Then, I've been told, it's true at my church, I'm sure it's true of yours. I've been told-that, some of you-not knowing what Unitarian Universalist meant, moved to that website, then linked to this church's website, and here you are.

Almost every time we have a group join our church in Dallas, someone in the group has found us through Beliefnet.com. I have to believe it is also true here.

It may interest some of you that Beliefnet.com now has a feature called "Soulmatch", a matching service to help you meet people online with your same values, and characteristics. In the initial quiz, to introduce you to the service, you can check, among other things, what faith you would prefer your matches to have. The list starts with "Any", and after the second on the list, shows all the usual main religions of the world. It is the second one that caught my eye. It is, "Spiritual but Not Religious".

I know exactly what it means. I've heard many in my church use just that phrase to describe themselves. I expect that a large number of people check that box on Soulmatch, so your chances would be good to meet someone if you also checked it, I would think. And I also might guess that if those people who checked "Spiritual but Not Religious" met, fell in love and decided to marry, they would have a high probability of having the wedding at a Unitarian Universalist church.

Originally delivered by Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister of First Unitarian Church of Dallas on 03 April 2005

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Laurel Hallman 2003

27:10

Our society, our families and our relationships tend to "edit" us. They prefer certain parts of us, and encourage them. But there's a lot more to us, and it doesn't go away. When we shine a light on the parts of us we like, our other parts go into the shadows. The shadow is the despised quarter of our being, or at least the unknown part. It often has as much energy as our ego does. If it gets more energy, it can erupt with its own terrible purpose, and run our lives like a mad puppeteer.

In our culture, especially recently, when we find two opposing forces we are taught to use the bigger one to destroy the weaker one. Whether this will work in international relations remains to be seen. But it doesn't work psychologically, or in relationships. The two sides are both parts of us, and must be integrated. Otherwise, we're more likely to flip from one extreme to another: the abused boy who becomes an abuser, religious fundamentalists who attack heretics, or a country that defines itself as peace-loving while claiming the right to declare preemptive war on anyone it chooses. These are some ways the shadow can erupt to define or control us, if we can't grow big enough to integrate it.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 31 August 2003

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

34:36

We've come a long way since the Middle Ages, but we're only halfway home. If you want a picture of people living in an integrated world where everything was really interconnected, just go back a thousand years. It was a very small world then. 99% of the people lived their whole lives within two or three miles of the place they were born.

They worked on the same farm, served the same prince or his successor, drank in the same tavern their whole life. There was only one religion. They attended the same church where they were baptized, married and buried. Many had just one or two priests in a lifetime. Virtually everyone but the priests was illiterate and the invention of the printing press was still four and a half centuries in the future, so there weren't book discussion groups where intellectuals gathered to ponder disturbing ideas.

The people didn't think about whether the world was flat or spherical, because either way, what difference would it make? They didn't think about solar systems, galaxies, the speed of light or the ozone layer because those concepts hadn't been invented yet. They didn't think much about abstract concepts like knowledge or wisdom, though medieval theologians did. And what medieval theologians thought about knowledge and wisdom is still instructive for us today. Knowledge was called "scientia" in Latin, the word from which we later got our word science. Wisdom was "sapientia"; it's nowhere near as famous as science.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 11 May 2003

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

© Davidson Loehr 2003

23:28

When I'm being brutally honest, I have to admit that I don't feel any particular kinship to beggars. I've worked hard, I have a job, and I don't always understand why they can't.

On any given day, about 300,000 of those homeless people are Vietnam vets. I have some feeling for their pain, because it's a pain I have felt myself. But it's been thirty years! Something in me cares for them; something else in me wants them to get on with it.

I'm speaking only for myself here, not for you. But if you look at our actions, I'm betting they show that we look at helping the homeless as a charitable act we would do, in which they really couldn't offer anything in return. A condescending kind of charity, where we do all the giving, they do all the receiving, and we get to feel virtuous.

As long as we see it just as a matter of economics or exchange, it might be ethical, but not very spiritual.

But there's another dimension to this idea of interactions between fortunate and unfortunate people that opens this out in directions that are profoundly spiritual.

When you look at people and see the holy in them rather than just their failings, it can transform both of you.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 17 November 2002

The text for this prayer can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

31:40

If I wear an impressive clerical robe and act very priestly, can I tell you what to believe? What if I get a group of fifty together, or 500 or what if we form a club? Then can we tell you what you believe?

When, exactly, do you give up the responsibility of speaking for yourself about your religious beliefs?

There are churches where the answer is "the minute you join this church." The Southern Baptists have fallen to this level of authoritarianism, so that at least two local churches University Baptist Church and First Baptist Church have withdrawn from the Southern Baptist Convention rather than have their beliefs prescribed by someone else. There is a rumor that the entire Texas convention may withdraw from the SBC.

Within liberal religion, however at least when it is being true to its heritage the answer is that you never give up the responsibility to speak for your own beliefs. We must always work out for ourselves what we really believe whether we like it or not.

What, then, shall we believe? That's the question we gather, as always, to explore.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 2 June 2002

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

37:54

When things change and we have to start over, one of our strongest concerns is for taking care of ourselves, doing what's best for ourselves - or, if we have a family, doing what's best for our people, our family. And as Vicki said, we're always starting over at something, because things are always changing.

If there's a science or an art to starting over, it might be summed up in the lines of a wise and witty little poem by Piet Hein, called "The Road to Wisdom":

The road to wisdom?
Well, it's clear and easy to express:
Just err and err and err again,
But less and less and less

Every time we start over, it's a time to err and err and err again - hopefully, less and less and less. This advice is so much more human and forgiving than expecting perfection at something we haven't tried before, and beating ourselves up when we fail.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr and Vicki Rao on 12 September 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

21:00

We have discovered Neanderthal burial sites in China from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, in which the dead were buried in fetal positions, in womb-shaped graves, facing east, toward the direction of the rising sun. It looks like they were trying to call forth the invisible powers of the sun and the earth to give their dead people a kind of rebirth. So some of the oldest evidence of human activity we have found shows these early two-legged animals treating the ground as Mother Earth, and burying their people in styles and positions suggesting that they believed they were parts of a benevolent cosmic whole that might, somehow and somewhere, let them be "born again."...

...We have called these unseen dimensions of life by many names, and depicted them in many ways. But always, those who were the most religiously musical or imaginative have tried to call them forth, to make the greater context of our lives visible and memorable.

We have created gods in human form or in animal form, and invented a thousand rituals - from lighting a fire to reciting the same words in the same ways to begin and end ceremonies. It may look like we are worshiping those gods, whether drawn as an ancient shaman made of animal parts or created in our own image, like the gods of the Greeks, Jews, and Hindus. But we are not necessarily worshiping those gods or enslaved by the rituals. Instead, the gods are among the vehicles we have created along the way to carry this great burden of ours.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 22 October 2000

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

41:32

I want to talk with you about God, but the two most important things you need to know about God, about all the gods, are that, first, they were invented many centuries ago as vehicles to carry and guard our highest ideals. That's why scholars say it's the most important reality in the world. But the second thing you need to know is that the reality is not God, not any of the gods; the reality is the importance of our highest ideals....

...The prophet Amos said that the people had misunderstood the nature of their covenant with this God. The priests were saying it made them the special people, the chosen people. Amos said No, being associated with this God meant responsibility, not privilege.

What Amos was doing was what all the prophets were doing, including Jesus. They were reclaiming the high ideals as things which must be written in our hearts and lived out in our lives, not hidden in a temple to be bowed down to as we listened to bad priests misrepresenting them.

I want you to understand what this means. It means that they all saw - even if they didn't put it this way - that God is a part of us. God is the vehicle our ancestors imagined, on which they projected our highest ideals. And the gods are only useful as long as the represent the highest ideals. When they are kidnapped for low and mean purposes, we need to reclaim our ideals from them.

Still, there's something audacious about thinking we have the right or the authority to reclaim our highest ideals. We project them out onto Lady Justice or Lady Liberty, onto idealistic visions of America, onto God, and then it feels that they are out of our hands, entirely above us, things we could never aspire to reclaim.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 6 February 2005

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

30:27

Each time I revisit the ancient Greek myths, I'm more struck by how modern they are. The Greeks saw their Olympian gods as personifications of the natural and psychological forces within and around us. So you didn't have to "believe in" them the way Western religions have always taught. Instead, you could just look within and around you, and find the powers, the voices, the passions and urges from which the gods were made. They're still a good way of getting a different kind of understanding of who we are and why we often seem so confused about what to serve with our lives, even from day to day....

...This visit to the Greek gods can give us a new way of understanding both ourselves - especially men - and the world that men are running: namely, our world. One thing this means to me is that all the griping among political liberals about George W. Bush is a little misdirected. As the Greeks would see, he isn't unique; he's just the puppet, the instrument, of the rise to power of the gods Apollo and Hermes, with Ares operating our Army and soon, perhaps, our domestic police. They are in the service of the voice they have taken to be the voice of their Zeus: the voice of the privileged class who feel entitled to money and power taken from the "ignorant and meddlesome" masses.

Our four gods now are Apollo, Hermes, Ares and an ersatz Zeus. Zeus is played by the large corporations, directing both our domestic and foreign economic policies. Nothing godly there except their power and arrogance. Apollo is all the functionaries serving these demands, including (at least) our past four presidents. Hermes is Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, the speechwriters and advertising companies who wrap the agenda in deceptive language and images, to sell it to those of us who have been put in our place as spectators of action.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 30 January 2005

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

35:14

The Gods of Men and Societies

This is the third sermon I've done on the Greek gods and goddesses, and it's such a rich field that each time I've been led to places I hadn't expected. This morning is the first of two sermons on the Greek gods.

This business of gods is more complex than you might think. For instance, when we talked about the Greek goddesses, I was just using them to see different archetypes of behaviors that are still familiar to most women in our culture. But we could have used them to understand the values of many families or public schools or good nursing, since these are areas often defined by women. So you find more feminine values in these areas, concerned with relationships, nurturing, treating everyone with respect regardless of their status, and so on.

When we study the male gods, we have to talk about how they define the areas of the world that men control, because it's most areas of the world.

But first, if we're going to talk about Greek gods, we need to take some time to understand what gods are. Different cultures have produced very different kinds of gods....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 16 January 2005

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

31:57

The Independent Goddesses

Two weeks ago, I brought you the three "dependent" goddesses: Hera the wife, Demeter the mother, and Persephone the maiden. Today I want to bring you the uppity goddesses. They were called the Virgin, or Independent, Goddesses. They never married, and men were not necessary to make them feel completed. These goddesses were Artemis, Athena, and Hestia, plus the Wild Card: Aphrodite.

Much of the information about the goddesses I'm using here came from Jungian psychiatrist Jean Shinoda-Bolen's book Goddesses in Everywoman, which I think is an excellent book for understanding the "goddess" styles as psychological dynamics that are alive and well today.

Artemis was the hunter who spurned both men and society, and traveled with a band of women who served and looked up to her.

Athena wore armor, and was a warrior goddess who protected her chosen heroes, all of whom were males.

Hestia was the only one of the six who was never portrayed in human form. She was more of a spirit, like a spirit of a contentment derived from going within, either in involvement with homemaking or spiritual meditation. Like the other self-contained goddesses, Hestia had no significant or necessary men in her life.

Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty. Aphrodite interacted with men the way a wine connoisseur interacts with a fine wine: enjoying its qualities, but just for a while. The T-shirt slogan "So many men, so little time" is one of Aphrodite's slogans.

When you think of these character styles in terms of the ancient Greek goddesses, and then look back over the past fifty years of our country's history, some surprising patterns emerge, for there have been major shifts in our scripts about what a woman should be over the past few decades.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 24 October 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

29:20

The Dependent Goddesses

According to Greek mythology, the three Fates spin out the thread of our lives, stretch that thread as far as they choose, and cut it when they will. That was their way of saying life is a gift of unknown length. During the little span of life we are allotted by the Fates, we often puzzle over just what kind of gift it is, this gift of life. We wonder who we think we are, or who we should be, what we think we're doing with our few years, and how to pull it all together in a better way. We try to find the path that feels most true, most worthy of a gift so short, yet so precious. We try to live a life that makes a story worth telling.

The question of who we are is complicated because there are so many levels to it, so many competing scripts. Babies in the crib have personality styles that are still a part of them twenty, fifty, eighty years later. Some of them whine, some gurgle and coo, and the odds are those dispositions will remain parts of their characteristic styles. This is what makes children become later attracted to some stories and myths, but not to others. In some, they recognize a part of themselves, and the story gives it words and form. In other stories, they see nothing but senseless make-believe.

I've been aware of much of this in my own life. The stories that have been most important to me-stories like "The Little Red Hen," "The Little Engine That Could," the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and the story of the Greek god Proteus who remained something sacred even when he changed shape-these are nearly all expressions of styles that my parents and relatives assure me I had exhibited while I was still in early childhood. The stories were attractive because they gave voice to parts of my own soul. And the stories and proverbs that are most important to you probably also reflect personality traits that have been yours since infancy.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 10 October 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

25:22

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. And all worlds are senseless until we can find a way to make sense of them! Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it. Myth making is essential in gaining mental health, and the compassionate therapist will not discourage it. Indeed, the very birth and proliferation of psychotherapy in our contemporary age were called forth by the disintegration of our myths.

What is a myth? Well, it is a script for our life, a kind of story buried deep within us and probably going back beyond our childhood even to the crib, a story that defines our peculiar style of living, and makes us who we are. This is the story, the script, that we live out in more ways than we can count. So a myth is a script.

The psychiatrist Alfred Adler spoke of these stories as our "guiding fictions," and that is another good phrase. A myth is a guiding fiction, an internalized story that assigns us a role within it, that tells us who we are and should be, and we tend to follow that script throughout our lives, both as individuals and as a society....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 3 October 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

29:04

At the end of his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran's "prophet" is asked to speak of religion, and he gives a brief lesson in Religion 101 when he says:

"Have I spoken this day of anything else?"

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, and that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate our faith from our actions, or our belief from our occupations?

... Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all....

Here's another short quote about religion 101, from the American psychologist William James, who was quoting one of his favorite professors:

"Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse."

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 6 June 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

27:31

This morning I want to take you on a trip to the very heart of almost all religions, all philosophies, and all physcologies. It begins with the idea of atonement which most of us know as the center of the Jewish festival. But the idea is no more particularly Jewish than it is Hindu, or Muslim than anything else. The idea is at the center of every spiritual or personal path by whatever name though each one has its own ideas of how to do it...

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 5 October 2003

25:57

It has been months since I did the first sermon on Dan Brown's book The DaVinci Code. Since then, I've read some more in some of the many areas of study involved in the many theories he weaves together. I've also read several critiques of his book, mostly by religion scholars trying to protect orthodoxy from this sudden public interest in what Dan Brown presents as twenty centuries of schemes and lies by the churches to keep believers from understanding the real message of the man Jesus.

There is a whole industry around some of these theories, with books of all kinds appearing. The industry began over twenty years ago with the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but there are wild and wooly theories on every aspect of this complex story.

I want to grant the critics their due, and identify some other theories which, though very intriguing, simply cannot be proven either way.

But even after eliminating all these things, including some fascinating theories which may well be true but can't be proven, enough remains to justify a best-selling book. So I'll want to talk about those things which are clearly true, are the real center of Brown's message, and which all by themselves justify the charges of two thousand years of misleading and flat-out dishonest misrepresentation of the religion of the man Jesus.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 28 March 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

31:53

Dan Brown's book The DaVinci Code has generated more curiosity and excitement than any book about religion in years. Partly, it's because he's just a very good writer, and it's a good read. But it is a book that basically says that Christian churches have been lying to their people for two thousand years about things as fundamental as who Jesus was, what he taught, whether he was ever really crucified, and his relationship with Mary Magdalen, who is really the central figure in this story.

The book is a novel, but it weaves together a lot of theories, and every theory presented is shared by some biblical scholars; some are shared by many. Some are pretty exciting, some are even sexy. But at a deeper level, the book grows out of, and is a powerful example of, a profound loss of trust and belief - not in God or Jesus, but in the things that Christian churches and teachers have said about them for twenty centuries.

This morning, I want to introduce you to some of the theories about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, their teachings, and the distortions created by those who ruled the Christian churches to hide these truths and mislead believers. Those are strong statements, but if any of the theories are correct, they are justified. And some of the theories are almost certainly correct.

I'm not trashing Christianity, as much as I'm exposing some of the ways it has betrayed and suppressed the original intent of Jesus. For what it's worth - and to me it's worth a lot - from my study of the teachings of Jesus, I think Jesus would hate what Christianity has done in his name.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 9/21/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

39:36

All of our Western religions were born into a kind of cradle, or manger. They were born into the worldview of their time, which was very different than the way we see our world today. Christianity was born into this kind of a manger. Two thousand years ago, it was born into what today we might call the worldview of ancient understandings, the scientific worldview of the ancient world.

Scholars call that old worldview the "three-story universe." It's probably the most intuitive, common-sense view of the universe we've ever had. You can still experience it just by going outside on a clear day far from the city.

Look around you and you'll see what the ancients saw: the earth looks flat, like a pizza. Just standing there, youre seeing farther than most people strayed from where they were born. Up above, you can see the dome of the sky. They called it the "firmament" because they thought it was made of rock. It was so heavy, the Greeks assigned their strongest god, Atlas, to hold it up. There were holes in the firmament, which light came through at night, in the patterns of the constellations. Up above the dome of the sky was where the light came from, and where the "enlightened," "illuminated" powers and deities were presumed to live in some way....

It was quite a small universe, really just a local affair. There was us, there was Up, there was Down.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 24 March 2002

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

32:34

There are fundamental things to understand about the phenomenon of fundamentalism, especially since September 11th. Also, an adequate understanding of fundamentalism has some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America's cultural liberalism of the past four decades. We were given the rare chance of a revelation in the aftermath of those attacks....

...One of the most important things we need to learn about the agendas of all fundamentalisms in the world. They are all alike. And the only way that can be the case is if the agenda preceded all of the religions.

And it did. These behaviors are familiar because we've all heard and seen them many times. These men are acting the role of Alpha Males who define the boundaries of their group's territory, and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of tens of thousands of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. Or to put it into jargon, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children, there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected, the outsiders are expelled or fought....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 3 February 2002

The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

30:54

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 7 November 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

36:35

One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die. Think of those android-type men in the “Matrix” movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in “Lord of the Rings,” or The Terminator, that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed...

...Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions whose nature is to destroy, even if it also destroys them? What on earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon?

It’s a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world. That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body-snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of both societies and real people.

You’ll think I’ve badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation. So let me try and persuade you.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 25 April 2004

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

39:59

I hardly ever do sermons on old theological arguments — especially on topics as arcane as whether we are saved by faith alone, or whether we’re to be judged by our works as well as by our words.

It really is an old argument, in both Eastern and Western religion. Eastern religions are pretty clear that your deeds determine your karma, and the kind of reincarnation you’re likely to have. They usually don’t give a lot of credit for just thinking good thoughts.

Judaism has always taught that the two great commandments are to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those teachings didn’t originate with Jesus. He learned them as a Jew. Even on their day of atonement, which they celebrate on September 15th this year, it is made clear that in order to make atonement with God, you must first make peace with those friends and neighbors you have wronged.

And Catholicism has also taught that it takes both faith and good works — plus a little grace — to be saved, and that the grace is most likely to come to those who have done good works. All of these teachings came from times when the vast majority of people were illiterate, and almost all teaching was done through stories passed down from generation to generation.

But after the printing press was invented and people began reading, things changed. Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation nearly 500 years ago by teaching that we are saved by faith alone. We need to read the book, to know what we believe, and we are saved by faith alone without the necessity of doing the good works to earn it, he taught. I’ve always thought Luther was dead wrong there. But since I’m one of those people who likes to read and think, I’ve also always hoped he might be right. It’s easy for me to slip into believing in salvation by bibliography. Like if I can just get all the footnotes in the right places, I’ll be ok....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 8/24/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

26:10

About fifteen years ago, I was visiting a small rural Presbyterian church one Thursday, and before lunch I overheard a small group of Presbyterian women talking. They were trashing Catholics or Baptists, and one of them said "Well, I’m glad we’re Presbyterians!" After a little silence, a second woman said "We’re not supposed to be Presbyterians. We’re supposed to be Christians." After more silence, another said "Even that sounds arrogant. We’re supposed to love one another, that’s all."

There is a whole graduate-level course in the difference between religion and a special club in that little interchange. Social clubs are about who we are, what we believe, what is distinctive about us. So this includes political parties, fraternities and sororities, college boosters, and parts of all religions. But these identities are always about who we are. I think of them as roosters crowing to draw attention to themselves. They’re not really doing anything, just crowing.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 6/15/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

28:18

I began writing soliloquies for the characters in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in 1988, as a more creative way to explore the many depths and insights of great stories.

As all who write stories learn, the characters have their own integrity, and once you’ve found it, the characters determine what they will say, not the storyteller. So the exercise of trying to put yourself inside the spirit of different characters is almost always eye-opening, and the stories usually lead to unexpected places.

This was especially true with these four soliloquies. I wrote them in order of increasing difficulty — the older brother’s story is the easiest to tell, because everyone identifies with his complaints.

The hardest to write, and the most surprising, was the soliloquy for the Prodigal Son. It has always seemed to me that his father’s actions put him in a tough place, living out his life among people who thought he was a shiftless cheat. As I got into him, it became clear to me that this parable — at least as I read it — contains the essential message of the man Jesus, at least as I understand it. And the lack of an ending to the story also seems to have been true to Jesus’ message: that this revolution can not be finished by one person or one God, that it is a conspiracy against the ways of the world into which we are all invited. This gave me a new appreciation for how unpleasant and unwelcome a message like this would be, in any time and place.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 6/1/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

30:38

I began writing soliloquies for the characters in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in 1988, as a more creative way to explore the many depths and insights of great stories.

As all who write stories learn, the characters have their own integrity, and once you’ve found it, the characters determine what they will say, not the storyteller. So the exercise of trying to put yourself inside the spirit of different characters is almost always eye-opening, and the stories usually lead to unexpected places.

This was especially true with these four soliloquies. I wrote them in order of increasing difficulty — the older brother’s story is the easiest to tell, because everyone identifies with his complaints.

The father was hard to write partly because I had to forget the confessional spin traditionally put on it: that the “father” is really God, so we must build this part up to be wonderful and wise. When I could finally just see him as the father of these two sons, he turned out to have a very different perspective on the story: less wise, perhaps, but much more human.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 5/25/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

27:18

This sermon came as a request from some of our members who attend the Sunday Night Live service. When we announced a monthly bring-a-friend Sunday, they wanted to know what they could tell their friends this place or this religion were about. They know that many Christian churches talk about the Good News they have for the world, and they want to know what good news we have to offer.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 5/18/03

The text for this and other sermons can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

18:16

Not Fit to Live? Capitol punishment

Before moving to Texas, I never gave much thought to the death penalty. Here, in a state that executes more criminals than almost all countries, it's hard not to think about it. As I read and listen to the standard religious arguments against the death penalty, I'm not convinced that there are any problems as simple as those religious prescriptions. The best I'll be able to do in this sermon is to expand the horizons of thinking, and explore a variety of arguments of varying persuasiveness. But for now, I'll confess that my guiding thought is that the quality of human lives follows a bell curve, with saints at one end, most of us in the middle, and some truly evil people at the other. Perhaps this will give us all the chance to re-examine our feelings and values on this complex and emotionally loaded issue of the death penalty.

Gods aren't "Critters in the sky," like big cartoon characters, even though it's common to speak of them that way. Gods are those central concerns that our behaviors show we take very seriously. We commit our lives to them, we are driven by them, and in return they promise us something we want, or think we want. Whether what they promise us is good or bad is a measure of whether the god involved is an adequate or an inadequate one....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on October 8, 2000

It's surprising, the number of times the study of religion seems to have three levels, three stages of understanding:

In a recent USA Today poll, people were asked what one question they would most like to ask God. The overwhelming response was that they wanted to know the purpose of their life. That says at least two things. One is that they don’t know the purpose of their life; the other is that they haven’t found it out from God, either.

Some of this is a comment on our times. In ancient times, even medieval times, people felt that they had encounters with the gods regularly. They provided places for it to happen. They had shrines, where there were statues of the gods, fires lit to them, temples you could go to be in their presence. But today, about the only place people still feel the overpowering presence of the old gods is when they fall in love, and are connected either with Aphrodite, the older kind of love, or Eros, the adolescent kind.

The myth of the quest for the holy grail began in the 12th century, the time many identify as the beginning of the modern world. One famous quote says that the winds of the 12th century became the whirlwinds of the 20th century, so this story may not be as foreign to us as you might think.

It’s the story of the wounded Fisher King, of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail, of fair and Hideous damsels. It’s a kind of salvation story, especially for men, a story of what’s wrong, where modern men find themselves, and a prescription for what to do about it. It is a spiritual story, with deep roots into what we today call depth psychology of existential psychology.

I want to talk with you about this old myth. I’ll move back and forth between real life and the old myth, kind of tying them together from the inside out. It will be a little like walking the Chartres labyrinth, where we start way out, seem to move quickly toward the center, then get directed away from it, winding up a long way from the center before finally reaching home.

We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives. We need better stories, more interesting plots to live out.

I gave four talks on a theological argument for abortion where I got over an hour's worth of questions, almost all of them hostile....

One young man told me that it didn't bother him that some local 15-year-old girls were having their second child, or that Lubbock led the nation in births to teen-aged girls who can't care for the babies, because If even one of those babies comes to know the Lord, it will have been worth it. Worth sacrificing thousands of human beings who, in his story, just don't matter.

In some ways, this is a problem of organized religions, which have been in denial since the loss of the supernatural world. When God can be no more than a concept, the concept has had trouble competing with other, sometimes better, concepts, and stories to live by....

Since I didn't grow up in a conservative religion, most religious jargon isn't loaded for me. So I usually think of the word "God" as a symbol for our highest ideals and values. And I think of the word "salvation" in its original meaning: as health, wholeness (it comes from the same Latin root as 'salve'). For me, the terms are kind of safe and abstract.

But when I hear many of your stories about why you left the churches of your childhood, or why your family avoided churches altogether, I realize that in the real world, "salvation" had a very different meaning, and not a very positive one. It meant getting a group's or a church's acceptance only as long as you agreed not to think outside the lines drawn by their orthodoxy. Neither my definition of God or of salvation would have worked in those churches. That's partly why I grew up unchurched: I didn't respect the few churches I tried....

How often have you even thought of reconsidering the concept of God?

God is discussed in our culture like a cartoon character, like a Critter. Almost the only 'theological' question anyone thinks to ask is 'Do you believe in God?' That's a question that only makes sense if God is a kind of Critter. Then it's like a simple true-false quiz: 'God is a big Critter living up there somewhere: Yes or No? And that's really dumb.

So let's get straight from the beginning. God is not and has never been a Critter, or a 'being' of any kind that would have weight or occupy space. That's Disneyworld, not religion. God is an idea, a concept. And theological questions are about the content and style of the concept, and it relevance to life....

Those of you who heard the Rev. Donald Wheat preach here on December 29th will remember he said one reason liberal religion loses out to the many more literalistic varieties is because we don't have a good story. He meant a story of creation, of human nature, of the human condition, and of prescriptions for the yearnings and fears that always seem to arise for those of us in the human condition.

Last summer, my 16-year-old niece had an even more pointed accusation. She's a Christian fundamentalist, and she and my brother visited me in Quebec while thousands of UUs were mobbing the city for their General Assembly. She studied this odd tribe as though she were doing fieldwork in a foreign, and weird, island. She engaged some of them in conversation, just gathering data, I suspect.

On about the third day, she announced "Uncle Davidson, I know why your religion is such a miserable failure." "Well," I said, "that would be interesting to know." "It's simple," she said: "You don't have a Book...."

The theme of this series of four sermons is "What's the true story of our origins, our human nature, the human condition and what we need?" Never mind what different religions may say, what do we really believe to be true? The sub theme is "How and why have the religious teachings of our society strayed so far from the truth?" The truth is empowering, it can set us free. Bad creation stories, false pictures of human nature and unhealthy concepts of God diminish and demean us. Part of the road to salvation is learning to tell the difference between religious stories that empower us, and those that enslave us; between healthy and unhealthy myths.

Last week I began by talking about the true story of creation: how the universe got here, what it's made of, what life on earth is made of, and how deeply it's all related. We're made of stardust, the stuff of the universe. And here on earth, life is made from just five chemical building-blocks that make up DNA and RNA. We are more deeply related to one another, more deeply a part of one another, that we can begin to imagine. The dynamic powers of the universe are within us, if we will see them and free them. We are part of a linked continuum of life; we should expect similarities with all other life on earth.

And yet the creation story in the Bible distorts this, takes the power and dignity away from us and gives it to the Hebrew God who was created as a projection of an ancient tribal chief. For historical reasons we can understand, the ancient writers turned it from a true story of empowerment to a false story of enslavement and obedience to the priests who spoke for the God they had constructed.

Dr Davidson Loehr and Cathy Harrington each give their Christmas Homilies.

Cathy Harrington

Bah humbug. In the past few years, I have grown to dread Christmas like a toothache. Why do we have to get into such a frenzy every year? I used to love Christmas! There is no avoiding it! It's everywhere. Even my jazzercise class this week was exercising to an entire hour of Christmas music. Not the good Christmas music, either. The tacky stuff, like 'Rockin' around the Christmas Tree.' Can you imagine? I worried that I might throw up. I even put off writing this sermon until almost the last minute...

I think Christmas is a tough time of year for an honest preacher. We say this church offers a religion for both head and heart. We say you don't have to check your brains at the door, but you don't have to leave your heart outside either. It's a bold boast, and the Christmas season always threatens to make a mockery of it.

Who would dare to tell the truth about Christmas during the Christmas season? We know all the supernatural stuff never happened. The world isn't built that way. Not now, and not two thousand years ago. We know it, but how could you say it? Especially now?

Some few people do say it, of course. Nine years ago at this time of year, the Jesus Seminar published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. In it, they said that an eight-year study of every saying attributed to Jesus had convinced a large international group of scholars that fewer than 20% of the sayings should be considered authentic, the rest written by the people who wrote the gospels, or taken from other sayings and sources at the time.

What the heck is Advent? We have some sense of what Christmas is, and Hannukah, and the winter solstice. Whether we find any of those stories compelling or not, we have some idea what they're about. Hannukah is past now, the other two aren't here yet. But according to the calendar of Christian festivals, we're now in Advent. So what the heck is Advent?

One answer is that Advent is the time of massive advertising hooey designed to make you feel guilty unless you buy at least $600 worth of Xmas presents in the next two weeks, and spend a total of over $1300 on holiday expenses. That's about the American average, including about $300 spent online. It will take an average of six to eight months to pay off the credit card debts. Some people just pay off last year's Christmas bills in time to begin shopping for the next one. Retailers in America make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Advent also means we are paying the highest prices of the year for a lot of stuff we didn't even know we needed a month ago.

If this doesn't sound like a spiritual exercise, it's because it isn't. The idea of giving gifts for Christmas only began about a century ago. Before that, gifts were given on St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, until merchants decided the two days could be combined to mix the secular and religious holidays together into one big frenzied buying spree....

Though I've had an article of my experiences in Vietnam published, I'm very uncomfortable talking about it for a reason that may seem perverse: they were sacred experiences. But if we're going to war, let's not pretend it's a video game in which people you love won't be killed, wounded or broken. I'm one of many, many thousands of Americans who had the experience. Perhaps I have a duty to share some of the stories, to talk about real wars.

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 10 November 2002

Many of you know of the battle of Galipoli in the First World War, or have seen the Australian movie. Thousands upon thousands of men climbing out of their foxholes, obeying orders to march into machine gun fire and dying in huge heaps. Tens of thousands killed on one day. One of the stupidest single days in the history of warfare.

You can see it a lot closer to home too, as people who work with battered women can tell you. To the frustration of everyone else, women who are battered usually return to the home where they will be beaten again because they prefer the suffering they know to the fear of what might happen if they leave.

It's also what makes it hard for so many people to leave an old religion that seems to own their soul even though it does not nourish them. We are an easy species to manipulate; we're slow to leave old habits and ruts.

You have probably been asked at one time or other whether you "believe in God." Pollsters love it; everybody writing about religion seems to think it is the most important question to ask.

But the question is incoherent, as are answers to it. It is the oddest thing: we think this "God" business is so important, yet nobody ever wants to say just what they mean by the word. That's the elephant in the room of religious discussion, and has been for a few centuries: what exactly do you mean by the word "God"? Once that's clear, it will be pretty clear whether many people would "believe in" that sort of a god. Let's just take three definitions for the word "God," you'll see the question of "belief in God" dissolves once you've settled the definition....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 20 October 2002

The text for this and other sermons delivered before March 16, 2003 can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

That's probably the first time you ever heard that question asked in a sermon! Did you ever wonder why? Why do churches, synagogues, mosques and seminaries so studiously avoid this most obvious, most fundamental, question?

Maybe there's something vaguely offensive about wondering, in church, whether there is or isn't a God. Maybe something blasphemous, like there are church rules and one of them is that churches are supposed to tell people, above all else, that there is a God, then tell them what that God promises them and asks from them.

Like you don't know, but ministers know because we went to preacher school, and in one of those courses a hidden, secret course that you people don't get to take we learned the secrets about what God is and what God wants and so now we come out here to enlighten you, and you pay us for it.

If that were true, it would be easier just to offer that special secret course to all of you, so we could eliminate the middleman and we wouldn't have to keep meeting like this. Unfortunately, no one has met or seen these gods, and those who do claim to talk to God are usually locked quickly away. There are no photos, videos or DVDs. It's all just hearsay evidence. What we have are the stories and histories told by religious scriptures and historical sources.

I've grown to like the story of Jesus feeding four or five thousand people when he had only a few loaves of bread and some fish. When the story is taught as merely magic, it's insulting to religion and boring to listeners. But as a many sided metaphor, it's less fishy. This is our first annual Commitment Sunday, when we will bring our offerings and pledges forward to place them in a large offering bowl.

Originally delivered by Dr. Davidson Loehr on 15 September 2002

The text for this and other sermons delivered before March 16, 2003 can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

You may wonder why I chose to preach this sermon now, this sermon about the two kinds of justice. One reason was because the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks is upon us, and most of the voices we're hearing from our media and our leaders are demanding God's justice from the angry God they have ordered to bless America.

We can't let that be the only voice we hear. We must be reminded that there is a higher calling, a calling higher than the trumpet calls of the flag-waving God who wants to declare unending war on anyone in the world who might not like us. I thought we learned in Vietnam that when you bomb and kill thousands of innocent people, you don't win their hearts and minds, you simple create more people who hate you....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 8 September 2002

The text for this and other sermons delivered before March 16, 2003 can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

The sermon title came from one of my many favorite Buddhist stories. It's a modern story, about a Buddhist who was trying to be present, as Buddhism teaches you should be, but was having trouble understanding just why you're supposed to be present. He knew the teaching he needed might come from any place if only he was open to it, so he was trying to be open, whatever that meant. While he was in this open and aware mood, he heard what had to be the noise of several hundred people in a large rental hall he was passing, so he went in. It was a big Bingo game going on. And there, right there on the front wall of the Bingo hall, was the lesson he had been seeking. It was a huge sign that said, in large block letters, "YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN." When the student is ready, the teacher appears; it can happen anywhere.

The story also says we must choose to be present, or it isn't likely to happen at all. And it helps to look in places where we're most likely to find some wisdom and healthy connections. After all, it isn't likely to happen at Bingo games very often. We have to be in the right place.

What are we filled with, when we're full of ourselves? We're not filled with others; others are different and have different interests. We're not filled with the world. And we're not filled with life, for life is so much more unbounded. We're not filled with things others are very interested in, as we discover when we can't stop talking about ourselves.

Whatever we're filled with when we're full of ourselves, it doesn't seem to be very satisfying in the long term, if the cries of loneliness and yearnings for authenticity we hear and feel around us are to be trusted.

However you would describe the trap of being stuck only inside of ourselves, how do we get out of it? What is the path that leads out of self-absorption and into a more satisfying kind of life?

These are among the ultimate questions of our day. We gather to pursue them, in the hope that there may be something of value to be found and felt, even here, even now.

I first heard of the idea of "living under the gaze of eternity" in graduate school. A professor said that's how to understand the ancient Roman advice that noble people should live sub specie aeternitatis.

At first, I had this picture of pretending I was living while everyone who had ever lived was watching everything I did. That was not an appealing idea! I had had a few experiences of feeling watched when I didn't want to be watched, and I didn't like it.

For some people, that's what it's like imagining that God sees their every action. This has never seemed like such a good idea, either. When I was a little boy, I heard that Santa Claus did this you know that terrifying song, "He sees you while you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!" Well, I never liked the idea of his knowing all that. I wanted to deny him access - set up a password or something.

It is an odd idea, living under the gaze of eternity. I can't imagine that it's very attractive to very many people anywhere. You've probably had some experiences of this, too.

This week, I was given an article from the paper written five years ago that compared the education of 8th graders in 1997 and 1907. Among the ten questions in geography were "Name two countries producing large quantities of wheat, two of cotton, two of coal and two of tea" and "name three important rivers in the United States, three of Europe, three of Asia, three of south America and three of Africa."

The professor of humanities who wrote this article in 1997 said reading this exam took his breath away, and he bet that most university students today couldn't pass it. "We have come a long way since 1907," he said, "but it is certainly not the high road we have taken." And he concluded by saying, "A small world is long gone, as are the standards that made this national exceptional."

And we reap what we sow. We're not only slipping badly in basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic as they used to label "the three R's"; but in our awareness of the size of the world, and the role decent citizens of the world's most powerful country should be striving to play in this world....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on 19 May 2002

I have heard a conservative described as a liberal who has been mugged. I have a new understanding of that this week. My bicycle was stolen from my car rack this Tuesday while I was having a dinner meeting with our church's Executive Committee. And a few months ago, I had a small Sony mini-CD recorder, a Nikon camera and a black leather bag taken out of my office. Both times, I felt angry and violated.

But it didn't make me feel more conservative. It made me miss, even more, the liberal humanities education that our students used to receive but receive no longer. It made me miss the teaching of morality in public schools, and to teach morality in a pluralistic society like ours, it has to be a liberal curriculum. I miss that. No, it won't stop theft. But it could help.

Under the cover of war, stories circulate that all is not well with our nation, that serious things are amiss:

• Hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned from our economy and given to selected corporations
• Civil liberties being curtailed and threatened - some say dangerously
• Growing evidence that our government knew of the September 11th attacks in advance, and may even have known specific details, including the targets.

As people of faith who are also proud Americans, these things must both concern and disturb us. If true, they have profound implications for our lives and for the soul of America. This morning and next Sunday, we gather to ask some hard and necessary questions. Our gathering is sanctified by the high and serious purposes that collect us....

All over this world today, about a billion Christians will be retelling the same story, of a son of God who was crucified and resurrected and who, if we believe in the story, can be our own personal savior.

Anyone living in the first century would have known a whole host of similar stories about gods who died and were resurrected. They knew the stories of Dionysus, born of a virgin and the great sky-god Zeus, whose followers gathered annually to eat flesh and drink blood symbolizing the flesh and blood of the dead god, and believed to impart his spirit to them. They knew the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris, where Osiris was killed, resurrected much later, mated with Isis, who gave birth to the baby Horus. Everyone knew the image of Isis holding the baby Horus: it was the model for the Christian pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. And the people knew the stories of other dead and resurrected gods, including Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis.

All these stories belonged to a mythic genre born into the ancient scientific worldview of 2000 years ago, where heaven was just up above the sky, hell was just below the earth, and the whole universe was a local affair. In such a small place, the gods could routinely sport with human females, and bodies might well come back to life or float up above the sky to live forever.

The Church's role had been immoral for centuries, conspiring with the wealthy to keep the poor desperate and overbred. And the religious argument always came down to the same passage from the Bible, one that anyone raised in a very conservative religion has heard before. It's from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that the line occurs. 'By the sweat of your brow you shall live,' the writers have God saying: By the sweat of your brow you shall live. You see, life just is nasty, brutish and short. It's hard, it's unfair, and that's God's plan, an enduring punishment for the fact that Adam and Eve preferred development over blind obedience. That line had been used for hundreds of years to keep the lower classes of people in their desperate, overbred, hopeless state.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers' unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. 'By the sweat of your brow,' he said, "you shall live!" And what, he asked, does it mean, "to live"? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like slugs or plants do? Are we promised, by this God in the Old Testament, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe and can move all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?

This is the first of two connected sermons, and should be read in conjunction with the sermon "The Morality of Abortion," delivered 10 March 2002.

For about 30 years, America's cultural liberals have understood abortion as a secular matter of individual rights where the mother, but not the baby, is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have framed it as a moral issue based on the assumption that life is sacred in and of itself and everyone has a right to it. Under Roman Catholic teaching, when push comes to shove the baby has a greater right to life, since it stands to get a bigger quantity of life.

I expect the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned during President Bush's term, and I think the majority of our citizens do believe abortion is primarily a moral issue.

If this is the case, America's liberals now need to begin doing what we should have done thirty years ago. We need to reframe abortion as a moral issue rather than an issue of individual rights. And if we believe abortion is morally justified, we need to develop moral arguments for it that can be persuasive not only to us, but eventually to a majority of the voting public. I have believed this could be done since I first preached on abortion over 15 years ago.

Like most religious literalists, I think religion is about our search for salvation. Unlike religious literalists, I think our salvation comes here and now or it never comes at all. I'm not inventing a new meaning for the word, I'm returning to its original meaning. It comes from the same Latin root as our word "salve," and means health or wholeness. So what is salvation about for religious liberals? What makes us most healthy and whole?

Originally delivered by Dr. Davidson Loehr on 6 January 2002

The text for this and other sermons delivered before March 16, 2003 can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermons/

Christmas in America has only been celebrated for about 150 years – earlier, it was sometimes illegal to celebrate it, or to take off work on that day. Sometimes, Christian churches look forward to it because, with Easter, it’s one of only two times in the year when they seem to matter very much (only about 20% of Americans regularly attend any religious services). And during the past few years, the voices of “official Christianity” have often been so bigoted and hateful that some Christian churches have stopped calling themselves “Christian.” And yet now, it’s the Christmas season....

Originally delivered by Rev. Davidson Loehr on December 9, 2007