Time To Stop Being Polite About Gay Marriage

Here’s a link to a post by Haven Kimmel. It talks about the 14th amendment and ensuring equal rights for everyone. Below is a sample.

And for those of you who “weren’t raised that way,” or who conclude your argument against gay marriage by saying that’s just how you “feel,” you have a right to speak your mind.  But let me tell you something the loose-jawed marionettes aren’t saying.  If the United States continues to violate the civil rights of a vast number of its citizens, those citizens will suffer in the short-term, but you will lose in the end.  If the regressives and religious conservatives push this far enough, the only option will be for the State to exit the marriage game all together, and THEN we will have achieved parity.  We will all need attorneys to draw up civil unions, contracts that grant us legal rights in medical emergencies and default inheritance of wealth and property.  Tax breaks will be a thing of the past.  Your privilege will be a thing of the past, and where you’ll find yourself is in a church, desperately trying to make sacred what is no longer your sacred American right.  But you won’t be lonely – there’ll be countless thousands of gay couples doing exactly the same thing, with the same results.  So really, Focus on the Family, it’s your call.

Untaming the Good Samaritan

What follows is the text of a sermon I’ve delivered twice. I usually don’t post my sermons here anymore, but this story played such a large part in my own decision to leave Christianity and in my continued effort to live an authentic life that I’m posting my thoughts on it. Peace.

Once, I was driving up highway 65 toward Chicago when, as inevitably happens on highway 65, I got behind an RV. I love RVs, let me say that first. I love to go camping but hate sleeping in the heat or cold on the ground with a stick or a rock poking me in the back all night. RVs solve my dilemma completely. But on this particular RV there was a round, red sticker featuring a smiling man with a halo floating over his head. It said “The Good Sam Club.”

The Good Sam Club is a club for people who own RVs and want to share their information. It’s a way for RV owners to connect around their love for RVing. And it’s named after the Good Samaritan parable, I would imagine, because that’s how we see the good Samaritan today. A guy who was all nicey-nice and took care of his fellow when he was down and shouldn’t we all be like that?

It’s too bad the good Samaritan has been domesticated. Because this parable is one controversial story. It calls on human beings to be so radically inclusive and accepting that I’m not sure even we Unitarian Universalists have really lived it out just yet. When Jesus told this story, my guess is that the people who heard it said the first-century Aramaic equivalent of ‘Oh, no, he did not just say that.’ It was radical enough to get Jesus handed over for punishment. It was progressive enough to speak to every movement against prejudice, up to and including the women’s movement, the civil rights movement and the LGBT rights movement of today.

The story started with a question. As the author of the Gospel of Luke tells it, Jesus was teaching a crowd when an expert in religious law, stood and asked Jesus, ‘how do I inherit eternal life?’ He probably wasn’t asking how to get to heaven. He was asking, how do I live the right kind of life? Jesus answered by asking him a question. ‘What do you read in the law?’ And the lawyer quoted Deuteronomy and Leviticus, two books in the Hebrew Bible. ‘Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.’ Jesus told him, ‘Right. Now go do that.’ But the lawyer wasn’t done.

‘Now look, Jesus,’ he said. ‘Legally, there’s still a question here. If I am to love my neighbor, who is my neighbor?’ Just like a lawyer right? There must be a loophole somewhere. You say something as simple as ‘we should be kind to people,’ and they have to say ‘would you be kind to Hitler?’ I think sometimes I do that because it’s easier than putting something like unconditional kindness into practice.

At any rate, this lawyer’s question actually reflects a debate that was raging in first-century Judaism. The Bible says to be kind to our neighbors, but who are our neighbors? This may seem nit-picky, but put yourself in first-century Jewish shoes. You believe God spoke these words through the author of the texts. Tradition says this is one of the most important commands in scripture, and you don’t want to screw up here. So, you want to know, to whom am I supposed to be kind?

Different groups had their various answers. The Essenes, the religious fanatics who created the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that the Jews’ kindness should extend to no one but fellow Jews. Some argued that the lovingkindness of God’s people should extend to the resident alien. Religious scholars by the dozens took cracks at defining what the Bible meant when it said ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ So the lawyer’s question isn’t really out of bounds. Jesus gives his opinion on this religious debate with the story of the Samaritan.

A man was beaten and stripped by a band of thieves and left for dead. And then come by two people who should have helped him. A priest first. The most respected man in Jewish society. But not only does the priest simply pass this guy by, he crosses to the other side of the road to avoid him. Then a Levite comes by. This is a member of the tribe of Levi, again a highly respected religious office in ancient Jewish culture. And once again, this guy not only doesn’t help our beaten and bloody friend, he, too, crosses to the other side of the road to avoid him.

What a couple of jerks, right? But what if you believed God told you to avoid this man? See, I think these two guys were just doing what their religion told them to do. In the lawyer’s eyes, they might have been right. They were probably just reacting to this passage from the Hebrew book of Numbers: “This shall be a perpetual statute for the Israelites and for the alien residing among them. Those who touch the dead body of any human being shall be unclean seven days.” Two priests can’t afford to be unclean for seven days. They won’t be able to serve the people. And how were they supposed to know whether this guy was dead or not? They can’t touch him to check his pulse or even roll him over, and I don’t think our beaten and bloody friend is talking right now. No, the right thing to do in the eyes of the religious community was to not touch this guy. Right?

And all these Christians who believe in hell today, and all these religious people who think we have to be careful about the people to whom we extend equal rights, they’re bound by a similar problem. They believe with all their hearts that you and I and many others like us will literally burn in hell forever for not believing that Jesus’ death saves us from that fate. They believe that their God will burn us forever for our politics, for what we do in our bedrooms. And because they are sincere in their belief, they are literally bound to ‘witness,’ to try and convince us that we are wrong. And some of us have argued with these folks. But, they say, the Bible says what the Bible says and argument doesn’t matter. No argument from a Unitarian will make a bit of difference. But Jesus himself refutes that kind of thinking with what he says next.

So the two religious guys passed our beaten and bloody hero right by, not because they were late for synagogue or dinner, but because that’s what they believed the Bible told them to do. And then, along comes a Samaritan. A sinning, no good, snake in the grass Samaritan. A Samaritan isn’t just a non-Jew. He’s a part-Jew, part-pagan who worships in the wrong place and does all sorts of other things the Bible prohibits, at least in the eyes of the Jews. In the vernacular of 21^st century conservative religion, the Samaritan is a hell-bound sinner. But when the Samaritan comes to this bleeding, dying man, he stops because he is moved by pity. Where textual religion and religious belief are a barrier to compassion for the first two passers-by, the Samaritan has no such boundary. He actually breaks the religious rules and touches this man. Bandages his wounds, takes him to the closest hospital and pays for his future healthcare needs.

Several years ago, a group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar got together and tried to figure out what Jesus did and did not really say, and what kind of person the historical Jesus really was. Here’s what the Jesus seminar wrote about the Good Samaritan in their book The Five Gospels: “The imagery of the parable itself draws on the longstanding animosity between Judeans and Samaritans. The parable subverts the negative, stereotyped identity of the Samaritan and throws the conventional distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ into question. A Samaritan who goes to the aid of a person, probably a Judean, who has been assaulted and left for dead, after two representatives of the established religion have ignored him, has stepped across a social and religious boundary. Jesus’ audience, which was made up of Judeans, would have viewed the story through the eyes of the victim in the ditch: the parable prompts them to think of the identification of their neighbor as a different ethnic group. The possibility of another kind of social world has come into view.”

Imagine. In an age in which people were stoned to death for being religious dissenters, Jesus does two things. First, he says to the Judeans in his crowd, when you’re down and out, help could come from anywhere. And sometimes, the people who are most like you will be least inclined to help you. And second, Jesus challenges people to redefine ‘neighbor.’ According to this parable, my neighbor is not the one who is like me ethnically or even one who thinks like I do and believes the same things I do. My neighbor is any human being. Our common, shared humanity is more important than shared ethnicity or religious belief.

I believe Jesus was a religious humanist. Religious humanists believe that religion is important, but that it ought to center on human needs and desires. Of course Jesus believed that! Certainly he believed other things too, but the parable of the Good Samaritan is a humanist parable. And its themes still speak to our world. A world in which, every day since 1947, we’ve been trying to achieve peace in Palestine. But at its root, the conflict between Palestine and Israel is about religious identification and the belief that if we can just divide people up along the right religious lines, everything will be alright. But we will achieve nothing in the way of peace across religious divides until Jews and Muslims, Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and UUs realize that although religious identification is important, most important is the fact that each of us is human.

I don’t pretend that’s easy to achieve. Heck, it’s hard to get there on a local level. I mean, how do we treat people who put up hateful church signs and preach hate on Sunday morning? You know, the Jews who were the targets of this parable did pretty much the same thing to the Samaritans. How do we identify with them on a human level rather than engaging our differences first thing?

It seems to me we have to remember that what we’re trying to achieve isn’t the warm fuzzies. You’ve had the warm fuzzies, right? You just see that certain person, and you feel love all over. You may have the warm fuzzies for your spouse or lover, for your children, for your friends. Warm fuzzies are nice. But love in this parable isn’t a feeling. It’s something you do. It’s helping someone when she’s down no matter how different she is, regardless of the fact that her religious group doesn’t like my religious group. It’s practicing that acting, doing kind of love whether or not it ever becomes a feeling. That’s the kind of love that proclaims that there is no ‘other,’ there is no us and them. No Jew or Samaritan. No Unitarian Universalist or evangelical. We’re all us.

May it be so.

And Now, From Nazareth, the Amazing…

Here’s Rowan Atkinson delivering a lesson from the Gospel of John. “And the whole crowd did know that it was a carrot. For it was orange, with a green top.” I love British humor.

Doobies and Newbies

This is a brief homily I delivered at the UU Heartland District’s annual meeting this past Saturday. The meeting was great. The emphasis was on the living tradition of the district.

Working in a steel factory wasn’t my first choice of summer jobs. As I would soon find out, some days the temperature inside the plant rose to 130 degrees. Sitting on a forklift, sweat stinging my eyes, I longed for the relative cool of the 90-degree heat and 80 percent humidity outside. But I needed the money.

One evening at my college, the University of Evansville, it was announced that there would be a meeting for those interested in spending a semester studying in Europe. My furthest travel at that point in my life had been to a Pentecostal youth camp in Arkansas. A semester in England sounded so exotic. I imagined there would be pubs and fog and people in knit hats who called me ‘love.’ When I learned that Harlaxton College in Grantham, England offered three-day weekends every single weekend, I signed up immediately.

All I had to do was raise the travel costs. When I told my Dad, he said, ‘why don’t I get you a job at the factory?’ That sounded good to me. They paid pretty well. And ever since I could remember, my Dad came home in his work uniform, dark blue pants and a light blue shirt with patches above each pocket. One patch bore the name of the factory. The other sported his name. He came home sweaty and dirty and I thought it was just so…. cool. Not only would I make money. I would spend a summer learning what my father had done for years and years. It would be great.

Or so I thought. Right up until my first day on the job. I woke up when it was still dark, something no college student should do between May and August, and I drove into town. This factory made steel tanks, like the one that holds the gas for your gas grill. They had machines to roll the steel and welders to tack on the caps for each end.

“It’s not so hard,” one guy told me that morning. “Nothing to it.” Then he talked a while longer and meandered into a story about a guy who had gotten his fingers stuck in the roller. He left three of those fingers in the machine. I was happy when the supervisor interrupted him.

“Andy,” the boss told me, “you’ll be working on the big tanks.”

Great, I thought. At least when one rolls over me and my life comes to an end in this horrible, hot, dirty place, I won’t suffer much. See, these tanks were huge. 10 feet tall, some bigger. Large enough for two welders to climb around inside. And my job was to fill these enormous metal tanks with water, seal them with a large metal plate and pressure test them for holes. Then, I would lift them with a crane, take them to the next station and lift a new one into place. The supervisor took me to my station, talked for a few minutes, and asked me if I understood what I was supposed to do.

“Yep,” I lied. “I’ve got it.” In reality, I didn’t even know how to turn the hose on, or how to get the hose all the way up to the hole in the tank in the first place. Thank goodness for Doobie.

Doobie was a veteran on the big tank line. They called him Doobie, I’m told, because of the shape and content of his smoking materials. But for all his extracurricular activities, Doobie knew everything there was to know about the big tank line. He knew the different types of tanks, he knew all the welders and their strange habits, he knew the perfect time to take an unscheduled break and when to avoid the supervisor. He showed me, by doing it first, how to fill the tanks and pressurize them. He corrected me when I was about to drop a tank from the crane and onto my head, by saying something along the lines of “Hey, dummy, don’t take those tanks over your head!” Might not have been dummy, I don’t remember.

It’s odd. I had lived for all my life with a man, my father, who worked in that factory. I knew a few things about what went on there. But until I was shoulder-to-shoulder with someone, doing the work, I wasn’t a part of the culture of that place. I couldn’t do the job until a real human being who had been a part of that work, that culture, showed me the way and helped me do it myself.

Angus MacLean said it this way: “We are not merely the bellhops of history, passing the baggage of one generation to another. Yet culture makes it possible for human relations to bridge the grave, for individuals who are so short of days to live with a wisdom derived from the dawn of time. Our job, however, is not to worship history and culture like fetishes, but to feed them into our living, creative stream of personal life for spiritual and intellectual reprocessing.”

History, tradition, is alive. Tradition is you and me, this morning. It is what happens when I, a newbie, hear about the way things used to be, and that story informs the way I do things going forward. Tradition is a living, holy anthology of stories that is continually being written.

What a joy it is to be becoming this tradition with you. Whether you’re a Doobie or a newbie, may you, as you go about Heartland’s work this day, be conscious of the writing of our living tradition.

The Life of Brian: Individualism

Here’s a clip from one of the best movies of all time. I watched it for the first time as a freshman in college. I was still a Pentecostal, and I felt REALLY bad for thinking this movie was funny and true.

A UU Historian on Recession

I’m doing research for an upcoming sermon on individualism, and I’m re-reading the last chapter of Conrad Wright’s book Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches. He discusses, in an address delivered in 1979, the move westward as a source of American individualism. He also talks about individualism increasing in good times and decreasing, or becoming less practical for society as a whole, in lean times. Here’s a quote:

“When the population increases, however, without proportional expansion of resources, the efforts of individuals, or individual entrepreneurs, to maximize profits without regard to the common welfare will deplete the resources on which all depend, and eventually the aggrandizing individual will suffer as well… The generalization is that individualism thrives as one moves from a steady state into a period of growth; and that it becomes dysfunctional as limits to growth come into play. When one moves from an era of abundance to the threat of scarcity, individualism can no longer be the guiding principle in social relationships, or else one ends up on the Hobbist war of each against each, ‘and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”

It seems Wright describes many eras in world history, including the one in which we find ourselves now. Times of scarcity and decrease demand that we become more adept at working together rather than working against the other to get what I believe is mine.  We have been taught, many of us, that we live in a society of unlimited goods. Maybe what we’re learning right now is that the money in our system, along with every other product, really is limited.

What I wonder is, what does that mean for the small town and the rural community?

My Inauguration Celebration

I’ve saved this cigar for today. It’s a CAO America. What an incredible day.

John Shelby Spong: Heretic

What follows is a sermon I delivered at the Columbus, Indiana UU congregation this past Sunday. I did it as part of their ongoing heretic of the month series. I chose Spong as a living heretic. The quotations are in-text and don’t follow any particular format. They’re all from Spong’s books, which are found easily enough in libraries and in bookstores. Hope you’re well and warm.

Why Christianity must change or die. The sins of scripture. The homophobia of Paul. God as divine child abuser: The sadomasochism in the heart of Christianity. These aren’t discussion topics for a humanist UU congregation. They’re book and chapter titles from the works of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. This is a man who has earned his spot as heretic of the month.

Spong and his books are found in the libraries of many a UU church, but the first thing John Shelby Spong wants you to know is that he is a Christian. Part of what makes his career so remarkable is that, from his early days as a parish minister in the Episcopal church in the fifties through his retirement from the office of bishop in 2000, he has maintained his identity as a Christian.

But Spong’s Christianity is, to say the least, radical. One of the major tenets of Spong’s faith, and one of the most controversial, is that he maintains a belief in God, but he isn’t a theist. Here’s how he explained that paradox in Why Christianity Must Change Or Die :”The God I know is not concrete or specific. This God is rather shrouded in mystery, wonder, and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed, seem relevant. The God I know can only be pointed to; this God can never be enclosed by propositional statements (4).”

Spong, then, sheds the traditional Judeo-Christian view of an intervening, human-like God in favor of this God who is the mystery of life. At the end of that same book, he says: “I am first, last, and always a believer. I define myself theologically as a believer who lives in exile. I have lived and worshiped as a believer. I shall continue to do so and to be so until the day I die. When that moment comes, I expect to enter even more deeply into the reality of the God in whom I have lived and moved and had my being. I am therefore at peace (228).”

Spong has tried over the years to urge the church to realize that a pre-scientific faith will not work. He asserts that faith in a prayer-answering, meddling god with his supernatural/human, miracle-working, virgin-born son is dying, and Spong believes that future Christians won’t cling to all those metaphysical beliefs. Instead, Spong would have believers try to live in tune with the spirit of God by following the teachings of Jesus rather than simply believing things about Jesus.

That move is terribly important. Because if your faith is centered on metaphysical beliefs, beliefs that people have risen from the dead and been born from people who have never had sex, for instance, then the text, the Bible, is essential. It is inarguable. The stories of the Bible must be protected as being newspaper-true. And that view of Scripture will always have the Bible in argument with science. But the Christianity of John Spong says, we know full well the Bible is a human document. It has its beautiful parts, ‘blessed are the poor,’ ‘do unto others,’ but it also has its horrible parts, stoning homosexuals and sassy children, for instance. When a person can see the Bible for the mixed bag of texts that it really is, then the miracle stories don’t need to be believed literally. They are true in that they point to something about Jesus and his teaching, perhaps, but not true in that Jesus had coffee on the beach with Peter two days after he died. Spong calls the resurrection, the virgin birth and the miracle stories “metaphorical truth and literal nonsense.”

It seems to me that this is what is most important about Spong’s work: what he has to say about the Bible. He reads the Bible stories of Jesus and sees a very human figure whose real transcendence lies not in raising the dead or healing the sick but in being able to talk about unconditional human love in a time when such a message wasn’t all that welcome, a time a lot like today, perhaps. He argues that Christians need to demythologize Jesus, and says this about that effort:

“The meaning of Jesus is found where his being made contact with the being of all human life. Hence we look at his freedom to be and at the effect that freedom had on others. We look at his security, his fulfillment, his peace, his capacity to give and love and care (This Hebrew Lord, 167).”

And so, the virgin birth, rather than an anti-science newspaper description of a miracle, becomes a reminder that the people who wrote the gospels believed that there was something about Jesus that was unique among the human beings around him. And on and on. And what is most important is not belief, but love.

“For Jesus,” Spong writes, “to be the Messiah meant that he must bring love to the unloved, freedom to the bound, wholeness to the distorted, peace to the insecure. Only in this way could he overcome the sin of the world. The only power that can ultimately save is love, and love was the deepest meaning of Jesus’ life (THL, 172).”

 But as we’ve said, Spong more than admits that the Bible also has ugly parts. In fact, he wrote an entire book about it: The Sins of Scripture. Spong’s discussion of Scripture around the issue of homosexuality and the church is more than enlightening.

Homosexuality, of course, is a hot button issue for Biblical literalists. I was reminded of this recently. This past Fall, the Danville church did a rally on the Hendricks County courthouse steps in favor of marriage equality. An ACLU lawyer who spoke said he was afraid to stand behind the podium because he expected either gunshots or lightning doing this in such a small town.

But most of our rally went very well. We had great community support. A police officer who was assigned to keep an eye on us crazy liberals said, ‘well, I just can’t see why anyone would be denied being placed on their partner’s insurance policies.’ Many people honked and waved at us, and some used more than one finger.

But by far my favorite protestor was a man who committed a drive-by Christian witness. A man drove by with his family, and as he sped away, he screamed ‘read the Bible!!’ I took the podium and delivered a spontaneous five-minute sermon on what the Bible really says about homosexuality.

A great deal of my ammo came from John Shelby Spong. Spong takes the Bible that is quoted by fundamentalists to justify their fears and prejudices and by talking about it in depth and in its original context removes it as fuel for the fires of hate.

Spong discusses, for example, Leviticus, which says “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: It is an abomination.” First, he offers some Biblical scholarship. He reminds his readers that this command is found in what is called the holiness code, which was written by the priests of Israel as a way to set their nation apart from and above the nations around them. It’s important that the holiness code was written when the Jews were in exile in Babylon. Kosher dietary laws spring up. It’s pretty difficult to eat with someone if you have to eat Kosher food in a Kosher kitchen. But it preserves Jewish identity through exile. The same with the sexual laws in the holiness code. The Jews used these laws to separate themselves from their neighbors and preserve their identity when they were forced to live in exile. They are certainly not useful anymore, but that didn’t stop people mailing Spong letters saying “Have you read Leviticus 20?” when he began to work for LGBT equality.

About those letters, he writes “I doubt if they were referring to the injunction in Leviticus that warns, ‘You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard (Lev. 19:27) (Sins of Scripture, 124).” And when church leaders in his own denomination were saying that decaying rules about homosexuality must be kept in place to preserve the unity of the church, Spong wrote: “A church unified in prejudice cannot possibly be the Body of Christ. Can anyone imagine a church preserving its unity by tolerating slavery in its midst? Is there any difference between that situation and tolerating homophobia? (Sins, 126)”

He isn’t a theist. He doesn’t believe in the traditional view of the divinity of Jesus. He doesn’t believe in a physical resurrection or ascension. Plenty of people have asked, how is Spong still a Christian? Including some of his fellow Episcopal bishops. But it is notoriously difficult to fire a bishop in the Episcopal form of government. I think that over Spong’s career, he has caused several Episcopal higher-ups to re-think their church’s system of governing. They may have lusted after congregational government, in which it is much easier to get rid of pesky ministers. Nevertheless, Spong retired without being burned at the stake.

But not without getting more than one earful from some important Episcopals. Rowan Williams, who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, said this of Spong’s continuing to claim the name ‘Christian:’ “Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?

Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this; and – if I can’t try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit – I don’t know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.”

One blogger I read recently wondered why Spong doesn’t just become a Unitarian. And we’d sure be glad to have him. But Christianity and the Jesus story are central to Spong’s life and faith, and he has simply decided not to allow anyone else define whether he is a Christian or not. And there’s something we can all learn there. You and I might hear that someone is a Christian and pre-judge them. They must believe in the resurrection, the virgin birth. They must be homophobic. But Spong, and the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, and many, many other members of the Christian faithful would prove us wrong.

Spong is a living Christian heretic who has made a great difference in Christianity and beyond. He has introduced a new generation of people to a more sensible way of seeing religious texts and religious figures, one which allows metaphor and image without demanding that we shut our eyes and ears to science. May we ourselves be so bold.

A Few Holiday Stories For These Tough Times

What follows is my holiday sermon for 2008. I wish all of you had been there when I looked at the word ‘Druid’ and my brain told me to say ‘droid.’ The ancient droids is now a running joke at UUCC. Funny stuff. May your holiday be happy and healthy.

Times like these. That’s really all I need to say, and you probably know what I’m talking about. Times like these, when we’re reminded that the greed of a few of us can affect all of us. When our belief in the systems which support us is shaken to its core. Times when, strangely perhaps, we now gather to celebrate. Of all things, to celebrate. When a half-million people have lost jobs this year, when personal budgets are tightening with no bailout in sight, when wall street tycoons and car company CEOs are reduced to groveling for a chunk of our money, what have we to celebrate?

Plenty, I think. But to answer the question more specifically, I want to tell three stories which, I hope, will remind us of the good things still present in these hard times. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction in these stories. But we needn’t worry about that today.

The first tale is the story of a young boy who grew up to be something great, but not in the way everyone thought he would[1]. He was born to a family with great palaces and horses and gold. Everyone expected this child to grow up to be a doctor, a lawyer, maybe a powerful politician. But wealthy people get sick just like everyone else, and when our hero was still very young, his parents died from the plague. Now, this orphaned young boy happened to be a Christian, and as a teenager he read the words of Jesus: “Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor. Then come, follow me.” The boy took those words to heart. He spent his entire inheritance on the sick and the needy and spent the rest of his life trying to behave as he thought Jesus might behave.

His dedication led the church leaders to elect him Bishop of Myra, though he was still young and wasn’t a clergyperson. Bishop Nicholas came to be known for his generosity, his love for children, and his concern for the sailors who spent so much time in danger at sea. He was a beloved figure in his hometown, and for a bishop that’s saying something. Even during his lifetime, the sailors claimed Saint Nicholas as their patron saint and spread stories of his life up and down the coasts they sailed.

During the lifetime of St. Nicholas, his country fell on hard economic times. Many people lost fortunes in the fourth-century version of the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, in St. Nick’s own town lived a man who lost all his money in the recession. This man had three daughters. In the fourth century, a father provided his daughters with a dowry to attract a good husband. A large dowry might draw a doctor or a lawyer. A small dowry would probably lead to a woman being forced to marry a minister. When St. Nicholas learned of the family’s problems, he knew just what he would do.

Late one night, Nicholas took some of the gold he had inherited from his parents, tied it up in a bag, and headed toward the home of the destitute family. He tossed it through an open window, and it landed in a stocking hanging to dry by the fireplace. When the father awoke the next morning, he found the gold and used it as a dowry for his oldest daughter. Over the next two nights, St. Nick performed this anonymous act of kindness every night until all three women had dowries.

I’m reminded by this story that our systems fail us. Economies and politicians and stock markets all let us down from time to time. And in almost every case, the cure comes not from those in charge, but from someone who has means and the kindness to do what is right.

The second story takes place around 175 BCE, a time of great political and economic turmoil. Antiochus Epiphanes ruled the Seleucid Empire, which had taken control of Israel, including Israel’s religious center, Jerusalem. And that might not have been so bad. This tiny country, Israel, was occupied for most of its ancient history. But the way in which Epiphanes occupied was distressing, to say the least.

He took into no account the heritage of the country he was occupying. And so, without regard for the fierce religious nature of many of the Jewish people, he built a gymnasium in Israel, a Greek symbol for fitness and philosophical learning. And worst of all, he took all the gold out of the temple. The place where the Jews believed God’s presence literally rested. He set an image of Zeus, a Greek god, on Israel’s altar.

Now, we may not share their religious beliefs, but surely a church full of Unitarian Universalists can appreciate the Jews’ desire to worship whom they pleased rather than being forced to worship the god the people around them worshiped. And we can understand, perhaps, why, a small band of Israeli fighters decided they would resist. This was the ultimate underdog battle. A few thousand people with rudimentary weapons against elephants and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and one of the largest economies of the time.

For three years the battle waged. Three years of fighting against an enemy that seemed undefeatable. A few times, the Jews thought they had defeated the Syrians, only to be attacked again. But some smart political moves (an alliance with Rome didn’t hurt) and some fierce fighting helped the Jewish fighters rid their land of the oppressive Greeks.

At the end of the fighting, the Jews rededicated their temple and its altar to their own god, Yahweh. And it was decided that every year, for eight days, the Jewish people would celebrate Hanukkah, the rededication of the temple. And beginning this very night, all over the world people will light small lights and give gifts and eat ceremonial meals for eight days, remembering that sometimes the underdog wins. Sometimes what looks to be inevitable isn’t if only we’ll band together, raggedy and tattered though we may be.

I love this story. In part, I love it because it’s such a human story. The more you dig, the more you see that there were a million little things that happened to help the Maccabees in their fight. And it seems to me that’s how life goes. Life goes on, but not always in the ways we expect. But I also love this story because I’ve felt like the underdog. Maybe you have, too. Maybe you do now. But we don’t fight the battle alone. There are just enough of us, even here this morning, that we’ll get through whatever it is we face. If we’re honest and open with each other, the human spirit will prevail, even over senators and CEOs.

 We’ve heard about a rich kid who turned bad luck into great fortune for the poor, and a ragtag band of fighters who kicked the big army out of their country. For my final story, I pulled some information from a book entitled “Fertility Goddesses, Groundhog Bellies and the Coca-Cola Company: The Origins of Modern Holidays” by Gabriella Kalapos. This last one is a story about my living room. Yours, too, maybe.

In my living room stands a pine tree. A real one. Now, in years past, we’ve put up an artificial tree. And to be honest, some of our artificial trees somehow looked more real than this real one does. But this year, we decided to go down to the old IGA and buy a real, live tree from the Optimists. A great name for a group that sells Christmas trees, I think.

Our tree provides a nice contrast to what I see when I look out the sliding glass door in our kitchen. Bare brown trees that a few months ago were green with leaves. Those leaves, now dark brown and decaying in the browning grass. It’s like looking out on nature’s graveyard.

That’s probably why people started bringing trees inside in the first place. Trees were considered holy by some ancient groups. Kalapos writes, “At the dawn of history, most of Europe – from northern England to the coasts of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, all the way to the Black Sea – was covered with immense primeval forests. Of these, only a few square miles in Poland still exist today. The temples of the Norse, the Teutons, and the Druids, to name but a few, were not located within trees that were cut down to build temples and churches but rather in the sacred living groves themselves. The divine in all its myriad forms was sung, danced, prophesized, and celebrated in these sacred places. The trees were regarded as full of spirit… (Kalapos, 245).”

But during the winter, it seemed to the eye that all divinity had gone. Everything green died, shed its leaves and became barren. That is, almost everything. Evergreen trees, in defiance of the death that seemed to surround them, stayed green. And some ancient peoples left offerings to nature around these trees. They eventually, some of them, began to decorate their homes with pieces of evergreen branches during the winter festival of Saturnalia to remind themselves that life persisted, even in the winter, when the nights were long and it looked like life was gone.

Look around you. Greenery is everywhere, reminding us that even when things look bleak, the spirit of life and nature go on. And that’s the thought I want to leave you with this morning. Perhaps for you life blooms all around. This financial downturn hasn’t hit everyone equally, and if for you life is all green leaves and running streams, wonderful. But if that’s not the case for you, remember that the spirit of life goes on in you. Even in the dormant times just before the solstice. And after today, may the love of this community and your family and friends make the light hours grow longer for your spirit. The trees will once more bear leaves, even if they don’t today. And may this season remind each of us to find the evergreens in our lives, to see the beauty there is to see, and to remember that these winter seasons do not last forever.

To remember that, rich and poor, rag-tag and powerful, we’re all in this together. And that’s reason enough to celebrate. Amen.

 

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[1] www.stnicholascenter.org

Jon Stewart Interviews Mike Huckabee On Gay Marriage

This is an excellent interview. I’ll let Mr. Stewart make the points. How can anyone still be against gay marriage? I don’t get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R2MCscO9r0