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