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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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© 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
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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
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© 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
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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
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37:54