Republcans Need Advice from the UUA?

Life would be a lot easier for the Republican establishment if they followed the UUA (and Iranian) model – just run a couple of approved candidates.

But now the poor UUA had one of their two candidates drop out, so now they have to find another.  (http://www.uuworld.org/articles/new-presidential-candidate-march-6).

Trigger Safety

We eat dinner each night by the light of four short votive candles and two tall tapers.  Formerly we used matches to light the candles, but it gets tricky trying to light six candles from one match.  A few years ago a friend gave us a butane lighter, and that was convenient.  But the lighter got older and conked out.  We got older too.  Now every lighter we buy has some incredible two-switch, hard-to-pull grip.  After spinal surgery, my dominant hand is weak enough that none of the butane lighters work for me - even though I'm still perfectly functional with kitchen knife skills, carrying bags, etc.

Yesterday I got sufficiently aggravated that I embarked on an internet search for lighters and what was the deal.  As suspected, this is fallout from child safety rules.  As of 1999, the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) required that all multi-purpose (non-cigarette) lighters have to be impossible to light by 85% of children under age five. 

OK, we'll let it go that I can't use a lighter because of the never-existent five year olds in my house.

But for God's sake, what about guns?  Why can't we impose the same kind of rules there?  The CPSC rule estimates that nationwide this rule saves 3.7 lives per year.  How many deaths per year would we avoid by making guns as hard to use as a candle lighter?

ReferencesSafety standards for Multi-Purpose Lighters  https://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/77807/multi.txt

What's the Matter with Marin?

A recent New York Times article titled "Who Turned my Blue State Red" opens with:

It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net. 

The article (referred to hereafter as Blue State Red)  goes through an analysis of who is voting and makes two observations:

1. The really poor don't vote against their interests - instead, the lowest quintile isn't voting, period.  If they vote it's Democrat, but they don't turn out.
2. Those one or two rungs up the ladder are reacting against what they perceive as a growing dependency on the safety net.  This is the going red part.

The closing recommendations:  Democrats need to improve the economy (to reduce the need for aid) and run programs better (to reduce the resentment in item 2.)

 

It's worth paraphrasing the concluding parts of the article to get the flavor of the thinking. 

So where does this leave Democrats and anyone seeking to expand and build lasting support for safety-net programs such as Obamacare?

For starters, it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit from the programs…

But it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic — finding ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible…

The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise… If fewer people need the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will be more likely to re-engage in their communities — not least by turning out to vote. 

What's the Matter?

Blue State Red has some parallels to the popular 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?  The problem posed in both is one of low-income people voting "against their interests."  In Kansas, the voters are distracted by social issues.  Blue State Red makes a different statistical argument that (a) the poorest aren't voting and (b) the next economic rungs up are resentful.

 

My problem with both of these analyses is their framework of analyzing problems in terms of homo economicus - (economic man):  the assumption that one's most important interests are economic.  This resembles the Marxist charge that some economic classes suffer from "false consciousness" - they are fooled and don't see where their "real" interests lie.  Both the bottom quintile and the next rungs up are significant beneficiaries of government programs - why won't they just understand?

 

But if people "should" vote as homo economicus, what's the matter with Marin?  Marin County - the highest income county in California - is solidly Democratic (in 2012, 74% for Obama  and 80% for Democratic Senator.)  The next two highest income counties, San Francisco and San Mateo, are just as solidly blue.  Why are these well-off people not voting for low-taxation Republicans?  If high-income people can vote for values against their purely economic interests, why don't we grant the same expectation to low income voters?  Are they supposed to be purely economically driven because they have low incomes?  This is either liberal bigotry or condescension - "those people" don't have complicated moral reasoning, or "in their situation, don't they realize that economic considerations should come first."

 

Democratic theorists can be caricatured as stuck in a materialist mindset - it's all about the goodies.  Look at the recommendations in "Blue State Red":  reduce resentment, fix the programs, get out the lowest quintile vote.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along - just need to tighten the program and fix the false consciousness.  It plays right into the mindset of Romney's 47%.

 

Instead, I think that the work of Jonathan Haidt is relevant here:  there are multiple foundations  of moral reasoning, but the relative importance attached to these categories varies strongly between liberals and conservatives.  And that in many ways liberals just don't get it.  This is summarized nicely in his 2008 TED talk.  A fundamental point of that talk is that of five foundations, liberals attach primary importance to only two:  harm/care and fairness.  Conservatives attach nearly equal importance to three others, named in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.  Liberals tend to be leery of the latter three, as tools that have been historically used by power structures to maintain control.  But Haidt's observation is the fact that for a large number of people, generally conservative, these moral foundations are very important. 

Take these differences in moral foundations as facts on the ground.  What is someone promoting a liberal program to do?  Here are three approaches of limited utility, although they provide a good source of self-righteousness:

1. Yell louder - "YOU'RE SUFFERING FROM FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS, YOU STUPID PEASANTS.  VOTE YOUR ECONOMIC INTERESTS."
2. Work harder - more get out the vote drives, more legal challenges to keep programs alive, etc.
3. Tell the conservatives that they have the wrong value system.  Just stop clinging to their guns and religion.

Instead, the approach from Haidt would be to expand the liberal moral reasoning.  His research suggests that the right cares as much about care and fairness as the left; it's just not their only wavelength.  In this framework, conservative moral reasoning isn't wrong, bit instead more complex.  Communicate to conservatives on the other wavelengths too.   A couple of thoughts:

 

One source of the authority/respect moral foundation is traditional religion.  Stop being afraid of it.  Stephen Colbert did this brilliantly on the Late Show when he said: 

If you want to know if somebody is Christian, just ask them to complete this sentence: Jesus said ‘I was hungry,’ and you gave me something to eat, ‘I was thirsty,’ and you gave me something to drink, ‘I was a stranger,’ and you… _________”

And if they don’t say ‘welcomed me in,’ they are either a terrorist or they are running for president. 

Colbert casts the entire argument in a different frame - not some dry intellectual point about universal rights, but instead casting it as moral imperative from a great teacher.  Is this a rhetorical trick, a cheap appeal to emotion?  To Socrates, perhaps yes.  But from Haidt, maybe a lot of people don't do their moral reasoning a la Socrates.  Maybe it is a legitimate appeal to how they reach moral conclusions, using a moral authority that works for them.  And this isn't just pandering - there are some great truths from those old dead men, a recognition which is out of favor on the left.

 

In general, the left tends to have an aversion to religion.  Rightly so in some ways - but by avoiding religious language because of a bad history from many religions, the left has given up a source of powerful language.  One of great rhetorical powers of Dr. Martin Luther King was that he could draw from the justice language of the Bible.  He certainly did not stick to dry intellectual arguments of economic fairness.

 

Another moral foundation is in-group/loyalty.  When we classify everyone by economic class (or other identity) we have thrown away the power of re-defining the in-group to have larger boundaries.  Our culture has cliché language for identifying with the other - "there but for the grace of God go I."  But we also have powerful religious language.  When asked "who is my neighbor," Jesus draws the circle broadly:  he tells a parable where there the Samaritan - a member of a despised religious group - was the one to actually take care of the mugged traveler.  Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul says in two different letters,

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one. 

Again, this is powerful stuff that would speak to a large portion of the country.  I think that one could certainly draw on this to re-define groups and loyalty, shifting attitudes by working within a different worldview.

 

Others might create better examples than the two I give here.  But the point is this:  continuing to ask "what's wrong with group X" reflects an illiteracy in in moral reasoning.  Continuing to make the argument on the same grounds, just "better", starts to look like the insanity of repeating that which doesn't work and expecting different results.  Turning out the vote or incremental decreases in resentment are simply  staying on the same playing field.  Learning the differences in moral reasoning, and shifting to the that ground, could actually lead to changing hearts and minds.  Lasting change only comes about because you have convinced someone, not just because you have beat them in a contest.

 

---------------------------------

References

NY Times Article:  Who Turned My Blue State Red:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html

 

Jonathan Haidt

TED Talk on the Moral Mind: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en

transcript:  https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind/transcript?language=en

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/24/the-yale-problem-begins-in-high-school/

http://righteousmind.com/coddle-u-vs-strengthen-u/

https://edge.org/conversation/moral-psychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion

 

Stephen Colbert, Immigration, 2015-11-19:

https://sojo.net/articles/watch-colbert-shows-why-gop-leaders-need-welcome-stranger

 

Moral Foundation Theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Foundations_Theory

http://www.moralfoundations.org/

 

California Income by County:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_locations_by_income

 

Homo Economicus:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

 

Marin County Election Results, 2012:  http://www.marincounty.org/depts/rv/election-info/past-elections/page-data/tabs-collection/2012/nov-2012/final-election-results

 

What's the Matter with Kansas:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_the_Matter_with_Kansas

 

False Consciousness:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness

 

Paul of Tarsus

Galations:  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%203:28

Colosians:  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3%3A11&version=ESV

 

 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Are You a Closet Dissenter?

In What's the Moral Here, Scott Wells writes that all the recent top hits on his blog site have been "posts critical of the Unitarian Universalist Association, or something Unitarian Universalist," which is not really the goal of his blog.  But he notes that there is clearly a market for that kind of material.  I had been thinking of writing a similar piece myself.  My posts and guest posts about the firing of the PCD district executive have received approximately 500 hits.  But when I posted about the Turley, Oklahoma church that was covered in the UU World, I got maybe 50 total hits.

Pledge break:  if you want to do something useful instead of reading blogs, go read my previous post right now, click through and give them some money.  Twenty bucks will do.  Then come back here for some more analysis.

Maybe the moral is that there is pent-up dissent within Unitarian Universalism?  In Beatitudes for a New Day, revtony wrote, "Unitarian Universalists do not bless dissent."  In Giving up Unitarian Universalism for Lent, Scott Wells wrote, "If I hear covenant used as a coded message to clam up and step back in line, I’ll scream so loud that Cotton Mather will rise from his grave."  Today my wife (a life-long UU) was talking to another old-time UU, and she noted that over that last decade it seemed like there was less tolerance for dissent in our home church; and she had thought that it was just our church.  But it seems to be widespread.  I have had a few responses to my blogs by people who said they had been UUs for decades, but were just getting tired of it.  Engaging in a bit of armchair psychology, I think there are multiple sources or manifestations of this problem, in no particular order.

1.  Church members who have found a wonderful spiritual home that is not beating over them the head about whatever failing that other churches (or the wider world) saw in them don't want dissent.  Their new home is wonderful, and they don't want to have discord in this place that offers them comfort.

2.  Tension between those who do and don't think that Unitarian Universalism is the religious wing of the Democratic Party.  News flash:  it is possible to have different ideas about governments and still be a religious liberal.  Full disclosure:  I'm as Democratic as the next person here in the City of Pelosi, but I have friends who are UU Republicans who are marginalized, and that's just wrong.

3.  Tension between the various religious wings - old-line Humanists, Universalist Christians, Pagans, New-Agers, Social Actionists, Post-Modernisits, and the rest of our 31 flavors.  No matter which of these you are, you know in your heart of hearts that some of your fellows are just cranky, illogical, or silly.  Rather than engage in reasoned dialog about our views, we just suppress them in the interest of false comity, and seethe about it instead.

4.  A wider cultural trend that equates support with agreement.

5.  Self-censorship.  We see what happens to those who dissent - you get labelled a troublemaker, and marginalized.

6.  A funny feeling that I get about UU ministers being scared.  Revtony alludes to this in  Beatitudes for a New Day:

Beyond the congregation, my experience is that for all our talk of congregational polity, our tiny little religious association is like a small national business or law firm and if you expect to have a career as religious professional in this business, you quickly learn to play by the rules, make allies, and certainly don’t question the powers that be and prevailing (although by no means successful) way of doing things, at least until you have final fellowship. For all of our storied history as heretics, I see us as a conservative bunch that doesn’t really like dissent.

I have seen some of this in the events at the PCD - comments suggesting that ministers are afraid of their congregations and the District Executive.  I can only guess at the reasons, but I think some of it is related to worrying about their current position, and moving to the next position.  I have heard of multiple Committees of Ministry at different churches, including my own, where the minister had no interest in critique, and packed the committee with minister groupies.  In a congregation, this can play out in a minister having an interest in suppressing dissent because they are afraid that it might turn on them.  Reading between the lines of the UUMA Guidelines, it's pretty clear that ministers are not to criticize each other.  (My observation of this pattern is what led to All the Other Ministers.)

*****

So where does this leave us?  We have no cultural capacity of dealing with dissent - no habits of presenting reasoned arguments, finding points of agreement, understanding the reasons for why we disagree (even if I disagree with you, I assume you reason - and if you don't, you should just retire from the discussion), and moving to a new point.  But this does not happen.

The result is that a lot of dissent is bottled up.  And blog posts about dissent become attractors for someone who says "gee, someone else besides me has a beef with Unitarian Universalism."  The number of blog hits that we get are probably a measure of this suppression.

So what's your dissent?

The UUA and Regions/Districts

I was reading the recent NY Times article on population trends and demographic patterns in the U.S., and did the simplest view of the data - zoom out to the whole U.S.  (See http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?hp?hp, zoom out as far as possible.)  Some of the population groupings are pretty obvious.  Considering the Far West, there is a clump down in Southern California, the Bay Area, and the Portland/Seattle clump (not that close together, but quite a bit closer than SF and LA.)  Note the large, lower density population gaps between them.  Why in the world would we want to make all of these, and everything west of the Mississippi, be one region?  The words from the UUA about virtual communities is mostly nonsense.  I say this as a software developer who spends about 50 hours a week in front of my computer, rarely goes into the office, does phone conferences with my wonderful headset/microphone - virtual communities may be a certain kind of community, but it is an attenuated community.  It sort of works to get work done, but really only if you have a pre-existing relationship with the people that you are working with.  We are physicial beings, living in a physical world, and time and distance matter in establishing real relationships.

All the Other Ministers

I read several pieces about Theodore Parker recently. (This year is the 200th anniversary of his birth.) One item noted about his life is that he was shunned by nearly all the other Unitarian ministers in Boston. The stories about Parker mostly note this in passing as a sign of the strength of his independence of thought and action.

But what about all those other Unitarian ministers?  We are told that almost no minister in Boston would share a pulpit with him, and no Unitarian publishing house would publish his sermons. And it wasn't as if the population of Boston was out in the streets protesting Parker's heretical views. On the contrary, he had to get a larger hall to accommodate the thousands that showed up to hear him preach each Sunday.

The 1840s weren't the Middle Ages. Parker may have been one of the first but cannot have been the only clergyman to have read any of the Biblical "higher criticism" coming out of Germany. And these ministers were already on the Christian fringe - they were Unitarians - non-believers in the Trinity, catalyzed two decades earlier by William Ellery Channing's heretical non-Trinitarianism. And they had Emerson's Transcendentalists in their midst. So it wasn't as if none of them had encountered or held any unorthodox thoughts about Christianity.

No, it makes me wonder if the other ministers were simply acting in solidarity. Even those that might have had some intellectual agreement with Parker found it more important (or less scary) to maintain solidarity and status with their peers.

Parker's particular heresy might seem quaint or irrelevant in the Unitarian world of here and now, but the tale of all the other ministers remains cautionary. We like to claim descent from Channing, Emerson, Parker, and others dissenters. But on what issues or modern orthodoxies do ministers (or the rest of us) maintain solidarity even when not really in agreement, just because breaking ranks would be scary?

Selected Readings
Articles:

http://www.firstuualton.org/Sermon_files/TheodoreParkersPistol.htm

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/171076.shtml

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Theodore_Parker

http://www.danielharper.org/blog/?tag=theodore-parker
http://patrickmurfin.livejournal.com/284758.html?view=160598

Parker's Transient and Permanent sermon:

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/14/

  

Appreciative Inquiry

This is a posting on a trend that I find distressing within Unitarian Universalism at the national level.  I originally posted it as a shorter response on Linda Laskowki's blog (where she graciously included these critical comments); but I repeat it here to keep it in the stream of essay-form things that I write.
 
 In the "UUA View from Berkeley", (http://pcdtrustee.blogspot.com/2010/10/appreciative-inquiry.html) Linda Laskowski writes:

... Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a powerful methodology that is based on some interesting assumptions:

1. In every society, organization, or group, something works.
2. What we focus on becomes our reality.
3. Reality is created in the moment, and there are multiple realities.
4. The act of asking questions of an organization or group influences the group in some way.
5. People have more confidence and comfort to journey to the future (the unknown) when they carry forward parts of the past (the known).
6. If we carry forward parts of the past, they should be what is best about the past.
7. It is important to value differences.
8. The language we use creates our reality.

 I will respond to this on two levels: first, appreciative inquiry itself; and second, the focus of the UUA board.
When I read this description of Appreciative Inquiry, my bogon shields went up immediately. These are something other than "interesting" assumptions.

• "In every society, organization, or group, something works." Why should that be true? Some organizations are quite dysfunctional. Or the things that work might not be important.
• The statements about "reality" are some combination of post-modernist and New Age mumbo jumbo. "What we focus on becomes our reality." No, that's just not true. Reality is out there. What you focus on is in your head. At best, what we focus on might be our model of reality. And it could easily be an incorrect model. I realize what is meant here by "reality" must mean "someone's model of the world", but to then use "reality" to mean that is rhetorical misdirection.
• Items four through seven ("asking questions influences the group", going into the future, valuing differences) are far from deep insights. In the flow of this, they are a sales job trying to "get me to yes", and might just as well have come from a Successories poster.

This all reads like marketing hype for another management theory. Oh, wait! It is a management theory. A quick check at Wikipedia for Appreciative Inquiry has big warnings about weasel words and sales brochure. The same is true of the page for the Taos Institute, created by the practitioners of AI. This suggests that even in the credulous world of the internet, these words raise red flags.

Which brings me to the larger issue: what is it with the UUA trustees and management theories? First we had Policy Governance. Now we have AI. And conveniently enough a person to tell us all about it. There is a case study at the Harvard Business School about using Appreciative Inquiry at a coffee retail chain. The net effect was that they reduced costs by 25 cents per cup of coffee. If you're a coffee chain, that could be big money. But at the end of the day, you're still selling coffee. Is the UUA equivalent of 25 cents per cup the change we are waiting for? It's not my idea of transformative change - it's just better management.

Policy governance, appreciative inquiry, changing the composition of the UUA board, election rules at GA, redistricting - these are all management and process issues. None of them is leadership. Vision is not going to come out of deep listening. From a post on Peter Bowden's blog, quoting Paul Nixon, "Churches that are paralyzed will gain nothing by self-study. They will just use the self-study as a stalling tactic." What do we possibly think would come out of such deep conversations that we don't already know?

All that can happen from these efforts is better management. We can have organized sub-groups rearranging those deck chairs and monitoring the exact distance to that iceberg instead of someone turning the ship around. We need to get back to what is permanent instead of the transience of organization change.

References

Peter Bowden, "Where does a Church Vision come from?", http://tenminutesorless.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-does-church-vision-come-from.html

Bogon: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bogon?rdfrom=Bogon

Harvard Business Study: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3684.html

Wikipedia Appreciative Inquiry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_Inquiry

Taos Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_Institute

On Clergy

I have been thinking recently about the role and status of ministers.  This is what I came up with.  Treat it as an on-line sermon.  For those who are not particularly drawn to Christian writings - take the readings for their inherent truth and power, not for their source.

Readings
Philippians 4:8

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things that are of good report; if there be any excellence, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Romans 12:3-8

For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.

For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function,  so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.

Matthew 5:13

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

Joshu's Koan

A monk once asked master Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" Master Joshu replied "mu."

The Essay
At 8 AM in the morning, in the first minute of the first hour of class in my first year of college, the professor in world literature came into the room and wrote the word "arête" on the blackboard. We were about to start reading the Iliad and we needed to understand this concept that was central to ancient Greek culture. Arête is translated to English in several ways: virtue, excellence, or goodness. In Paul's letter to the Philippians, the word "excellence" is the Greek arête. Recall that both Jesus and Paul were speaking in a culture that had been immersed in Greek thought for 300 years. In this essay I want to talk about arête and the clergy.

Historically we have two different kinds of clergy. One kind is a priest. A priest performs religious rites and is an intermediary between God and people. The ancient Jews had priests who made offerings and sacrifices in the Temple. Other religions also have priests with similar special status, including the special status of Catholic priests to perform the Mass. Post-Reformation, we have clergy who are titled minister or pastor.

Protestant clergy are not priests – they do not have a special role with respect to God. In Jewish tradition, there was and continues to be another role besides the priest – the rabbi. The rabbi can be an interpreter of Jewish law; or an active teacher. Jesus was referred to as rabbi.

All occupations have expectations of what the person in the role provides. In The Republic Plato asks what is the virtue or excellence – the Greek arête – of a tool, artifact, or occupation. A shovel is supposed to be able to dig; and if it has too short a handle, or a dull blade, we judge it to be a poor shovel. A good attorney uses their analytical powers and special knowledge to benefit their client. A physician heals the sick. A farmer is expected to provide food that is nourishing and pleasing, and a plumber is supposed to keep the water in the pipes and not on my floor.

To the degree that we view the role of each occupation to be more important to us personally or to society in general, and the degree of self-sacrifice, we accord a higher social respect (if not necessarily money – "they have their reward") to that occupation.

Clergy, whether ministers, priests, or rabbis, occupy a special cultural position. It is not just a profession; they are accorded respect and deference because we expect that they have taken on special responsibilities. They are not the only profession with a special position of social respect. For example, firemen are respected because they have taken on the responsibility to risk their life to save us from a horrible fate.

But the clergy have a very high respect level (even up to the point that our government gives them special recognition in the tax code and other law.) So we as society must associate them the some very special arête.

So we ask, "What is the special arête of the clergy?" There are two responses.

1. Demand the Clergy be Exemplars
Given that society grants a special role to clergy, then what is the arête of the clergy? Is it that they are learned? That cannot be it, for there are many learned professions, and while we grant them some respect, it is not like that of the clergy. Is it that we may speak to them in confidence and receive counsel? We can speak in confidence to an attorney or a therapist, but they are not accorded the position of the clergy.

Paul lists various spiritual gifts, and it is these we expect in the clergy: prophecy, teaching, exhortation, discernment, or pastoral care. These gifts vary between people. We would not expect a minister to have a full measure of all of these. But we do expect them to have a spiritual call and capacity for one or several.

I assert that the arête of the clergy is to be focused and connected to the divine – righteousness, justice, mercy, eternal truths about the human condition, and awareness of the arc of the universe. And it is not just knowledge of these things. If I have knowledge of being a fireman, but don't fight fires, I am not a fireman. If I merely study righteousness, but act the same as everyone else, then I am not acting in the role to which we have given the social respect.

This is a high standard. If a member of the clergy does not have this arête, then we have two choices. Like the shovel with a short handle, we can try to fix it, or we can give up and throw it away. But it is not useful as a shovel, and we should not try to keep using it as such.

2. Reject the Special Status of the Clergy
Picture Paul as a first-century church consultant.

Paul uses the parable of the body in both the letter to the church in Rome and in Corinth. He would not have included the same analogy and warning in letters to two separate churches unless the issue had come up multiple times. What is the issue? It does not take much reading between the lines to understand that some members of the church consider themselves special and separate because of their gift, and that it happened in more than one place.

Luther denounced the doctrine of sacerdotalism – the special status of one who can make offerings to God – arguing for the "priesthood of all believers." So most Protestant denominations have ministers who are not "priests", but still hold a special position and are styled "reverend." But several strains of Christianity before and after Luther went even farther. In England, a century before Luther, the Lollard followers of John Wycliffe rejected the office of priest or minister entirely. A century and a half after Luther the Quakers came to the same conclusion; and in the early nineteenth century, the Plymouth Brethren also.

This leads me to a new understanding of the Quaker use of "thou" and the usage of "brother" and "sister" in some other churches. It emphasizes that all members are equal members of the same body. With this understanding, we would abolish the status of minister as a leftover relic of the priesthood. We would recognize the different gifts of our members, but not raise any member to a higher status because of their particular gift. The answer to the question "what is the special arête of the clergy" is "mu" -- every person has their own special arête.


Bibliography

Gifts of the spirit and parable of the body: I Corinthians 12. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2012&version=NIV

Arête: http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/ARETE.HTM

The Republic:  http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html - search for physician

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D1%3Apage%3D341

Plymouth Brethren: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Brethren. Conservative Christian Evangelical church, started in Dublin c. 1827, first English assembly was in Plymouth. No ministers, officially no name for the church.

Quakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker. Reject sola scriptura, believe in continuing revelation, had a Universalist split in N. America 1827, the two sides rejoined in 1955.

Lollardy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollardy

John Wycliffe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe

A Christian view on gifts: http://mintools.com/gifts-list.htm

Does a dog have Buddha nature? http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2000/07/Does-A-Dog-Have-Buddha-Nature.aspx

Church, Religion, and Faith

As a springboard for discussion, my church had the following in the order of service:

We call ourselves the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu. Church implies religion. Are we a religion? Religion implies faith. What roles do faith and religion play in the lives of Unitarians? Reflect on these questions.

Having been urged to reflect to on the questions, I instead found my questioning the assumptions. Do these things really imply each other? Says who, and why? What do these words even mean?

We use the words "church", "religion", and "faith" and react to them without knowing their history and deep meaning. We are the inheritors of several wisdom traditions that use these words. But if we don't know what was meant by these words, we can find ourselves arguing about current definitions that have been divorced from tradition. When we do this, we are then re-inventing all of philosophy and religion with each generation. We are like listeners to a traveler who describes the animal he saw that looked like a camel with spots like a leopard, when we don't even know what a camel or a leopard are. So we spend our time talking about camels and leopards, and never do get around to picturing a giraffe.

Part of our tradition, as exemplified by Michael Servetus and William Ellery Channing, is to consider the original meaning of words and reach conclusions based on that analysis. So let us consider these three words.

"Church" comes from Greek through German, a combination of the word for Lord (kyrios) and place: hence, the Lord's house - very Jewish and Christian sounding. But one step before that, kyrios comes from kyros: power. So "church" comes from works meaning "a place of power." Now it's pretty broad - in those terms, it could even be used in a Pagan tradition. But what does it mean to us? What is the power in our church? Do we claim our power? Do we run away from it? Taking a question from Jesus, do we hide our lamp under a basket?

"Religion" is from the Latin religare, "to fasten, to bind fast", as in "a bond between humans and gods." This is the same root as the word "rely". It did not take on the meaning of "a particular system of beliefs" until the 1300s. So the assertion in opening, "religion implies faith" has been definitional since then. But it evokes a different image if we think of a religion as something that binds us together, something that we rely on. How does our religion bind use? On what do we rely?

Finally, "faith" is from the Latin fides, the root word of fidelity. This is the sense of faithful or loyal. It did not formerly mean the modern usage of "belief with no proof." The geyser named "Old Faithful" is named after its dependability, not because the geyser believes in something. When Paul writes "now abide these three, faith, hope, and charity", the word in the Greek translated as "faith" means "trust", not "belief." What do we trust? To what are we loyal?

So bring it back to the original questions. I originally found the questions full of hidden assumptions. But after my etymological detour, the set of words are much more intriguing. We are the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu - a church, a place of power. But that power is not inherent in the name, or the physical place. If there are no people to claim that power, it disappears. As Jesus said, "you are the salt of the earth - but if the salt has become tasteless, it is thrown out and trampled under foot." It is only a place of power because of our members, our practices, and our mission. It gets its power from our reliance on one another, our reliance on our inheritance of wisdom from the past, our trust in each other, and our faithfulness to our mission.

Some thoughts from Orwell

We were poking around the other night on our Roku and found the BBC documentary archives with a segment called "Useful Idiots".  (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008vd41.)  They cited a paraphrased quote from George Orwell, "There are some things that are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them."  In searching for a citation, I could not find this quote exactly; but something very like it appears in an Orwell essay Notes on Nationalism, May, 1945.  He uses the word "nationalism" for something very broad - the belief and defense of the superiority of a group.  This group might be a nationality, or a belief system.  It's still applicable and worth a read:  http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/nationalism.html

Ghosts

I live in a world of ghosts. Not the scary movie kind. These ghosts just drift around muttering. What do they mutter? Various thoughts: "The unexamined life is not worth living." "Whatsoever you did to the least of these, you did unto me." "It still moves." "We hold these truths to be self-evident…" "We will fight them on the beaches…" "Are you now or have you ever been…" "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" "I have a dream…"


These are the ghosts of our intellectual ancestors. Some are good. Some are evil. The ghosts are real, and they are all around us. If you can hear them, you can draw power from the good ones, and they can help you to know how to counter the bad ones. But if you don't know the ghosts are there, they can play intellectual poltergeist or worse.

Ideas define the reality that we live in. I am not saying that ideas change reality. But we act on the reality that we perceive, and that perception is largely defined by the ideas we receive. Galileo did not cause the earth to suddenly start revolving around the Sun, or Jupiter to suddenly have moons. But his writings redefined our view of the reality that we live in, which is almost as powerful as having changed reality itself.

Other ghosts have created false realities, just as compelling. The twentieth century mirage of human perfectibility through Marxist-Leninism, if somehow it could just be carried out correctly, drew in thousand or millions of believers and caused untold suffering and death. The perceived reality of religious fundamentalists of all stripes continues to cause suffering and conflict. These are powerful ghosts.

Many people don't hear the ghosts. They haven't been taught about the good ones or the bad ones. They don't know the grand sweep of intellectual battles between the ghosts. Sometimes this might be comforting: some of the ghosts can be a bit tedious and full of themselves, along with those of the living who spend too much time talking to the ghosts. But ignorance of the ghosts is not a defense against them. They defined the world we live in. Their allies and acolytes work to define the future. If we don’t hear the ghosts, we are at their mercy - and some of them are quite malevolent.

What ghosts do you hear? What are they saying, who are they arguing with, and why? Which ones should you really learn more about?

"A people with no history is like a person with no memory."

Listen to the ghosts. Find out more about them - the good ones to be listened to for advice, the bad ones to be forewarned about their living allies.

Interim Minister Halfway Through the Year

My church has an interim minister, one of two one-year interim ministers as we look for a new settled minister. In January, about midway through the period for this interim, the minister gave a sermon that I gather is sort of stock for an interim – an assessment of where we are, and thoughts on where we could be going as a congregation.

I was very unhappy with the sermon. Not because it was not uplifting or dynamic – not every sermon is or should be. There are also contemplative, chastising, or comforting sermons. I just think it wasn't very good, even in the context of what it was trying to achieve.

Stripping away the body of the sermon, and reducing it to its main points, the sermon said the following.

The interim minister has been here for 4 months, and has observed the following points about our congregation:

1. Some people have said they want the church to be like a family
2. Some people have said they want the church to have a social justice mission
3. We have a culture of being too "nice" and avoid anything that might look like conflict.
4. We have some (untrue) myths about our history – how big we were or not at some point in the past. Yes, we have lost members; no, we were never huge.
5. This church has a financial problem: we are not paying our operating costs and are living off a bequest.

It finished with a reading from James 2:14-18. (Faith without works is dead.)

I may have skipped one or two points, but that would not make the above box much bigger. There were also a couple of suggestions about (2) and (5) but they were just suggestive. If the above was the entire sermon – I mean that literally – it would have short and sweet, but probably still not very satisfying.

I agree with the interim that the above are true and important. And I think they could be the launching point for a better sermon. In the next section I give my thoughts on an example.

An Alternate Sermon

A prefatory note – I quote several times from the Christian tradition. This is not common in this particular church. But we cut ourselves off from some important insights if we avoid the Bible. All of the wisdom literatures survived thousands of years, by hand copying and oral traditions, because their words held power. The early Christian writings are perhaps especially relevant because they were also struggling with what it meant to be a new kind of church.

The reading

Matthew 5:13-16

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

The Sermon

I have been at this church for four months, met with some of you in various settings, and have made the following observations:

1. Some people have said they want the church to have a social justice mission
2. Some people have said they want the church to be like a family
3. This church has a culture of begin too "nice" and avoids anything that might look like conflict.
4. This church has a financial problem: we are not paying our operating costs and are living off a bequest.

Start with number one, the desire for a social justice mission. Action for social justice is an important part of our identity and history as Unitarian Universalists. But it is not the reason for the church to exist. We are a church, not a social justice organization. There are many social action organizations in the world: the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Doctors without Borders, and many others. If all that we have is a social justice mission, then these other organizations are doing the job, and we may as well close up shop and go work with the organization of our choice. Consider one of the most important social justice prophets of the twentieth century – Martin Luther King. But I just dropped his title – he was the Reverend King. His quest for civil rights and economic justice came from a religious foundation. His person religion and his church gave him the vision and the courage to pursue his fight. Another leader, Mahatma Gandhi, was grounded in the Hindu and Buddhist concept of ahimsa – non-violence. We modern Unitarians sometimes revere the social justice movements and treat their religious foundations as incidental. I suggest that it is the other way around – truly powerful social justice movements require a spiritual foundation.

So what is a church? I suggest that one way of looking at a church is as three concentric circles.  The inner circle is labeled Individual. The next circle is Community. The outer circle is The World.

The world's religious traditions address these circles with varying emphasis. Much of what the Buddha said was about personal spiritual practice – the inner circle. Much of traditional Jewish law is about maintaining the community – the second circle. Meditation, religious education, worship, small group ministry, and pastoral care all work within the first two circles. Social action is the third circle – our vision of a just world. Our church cannot choose to work at just one or two of these levels – we must work at all three.

Without the support of the inner two levels, the third one has no foundation. When Jesus addressed the Jews of his time, he tells them that they are the light of the world – they have a message from God about justice and righteousness – and they are the salt of the earth. The metaphor of salt is important in an ancient context. We think of salt as readily available. But salt in ancient times was very valuable. The word "salary" comes from the Latin "money to buy salt with." Salt is necessary to preserve food, to add taste to food, and to replenish the salt lost from our bodies. But Jesus chastises the Jews – if you have lost your essence as salt, you cannot be a light to the world – you will be thrown out as useless. Paul makes a similar point in the letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a clanging cymbal. If I give all I possess to the poor, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Without an inner spiritual life, social justice is just going through the motions.

Conversely, we cannot stop at just the first and second circles. In the New Testament letter of James, he writes:

What use is it if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled," and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? So faith, if it has no works, is dead by itself.

So our church must have all three circles – each as a foundation to the next.

The third and fourth observations are symptoms, not goals. I suggest that they both stem from the same underlying problem: we don't take ourselves seriously enough. When you care deeply about something, you get annoyed and sometimes angry when it doesn't work right or live up to its standards. Jesus was not the sweet person shown in the familiar modern Christian painting. He was a Jew, preaching to Jews, and he was angry at the condition of their religion. He frequently called the church leadership a "brood of vipers" to their face and every time he saw them coming, and he physically drove the money changers out of the temple. He was not "nice", because he cared about his religion.

This congregation has been the beneficiary of a large bequest that is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it led to a set of activities, such as an expanded religious education program, that helped to create a dynamic church. It is a curse because it lets us be lazy. We do not have to make the hard decisions on what is more important to us, and whether we are willing to contribute to it – we just dip into the endowment. It has allowed us to not take ourselves seriously. Two responses to this state of affairs are "why should I give any more money – it's there already" and "why should I give money to an organization that can't figure out its priorities." I am not a complete optimist of the "if you build it, they will come", but it is certainly true in reverse – if you don't take yourself seriously, the money certainly won't come. We have to take ourselves seriously. Who we are and what we do matters.

Our children's story this morning was Stone Soup. We can link this story to our process of working toward having a new settled minister. A new minister is not going to arrive in town, wave her hands, and suddenly she will make everything better. The young soldier in the story was not a magician. The stones in the soup are not magic. They are merely a guide and a device to encourage us to bring forth that which we already have. If we each tend our own spiritual garden, and combine our gifts together in the community, we can develop the spiritual nourishment that will be ready for other visitors who appear in our church.

We’re Off to See the Wizard

Today I am going to talk about journeys and wizards. The vehicle for my quest is the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz is a wonderful movie, rich in symbolism. Like any complex work of literature, we can find multiple meanings in it as we view it through different eyes with different backgrounds. I'm going to look at it a bit differently in this sermon.

As we start out, poor Dorothy can't seem to make up her mind. There she was back in Kansas, singing about going over the rainbow. Next thing you know, a twister picks up her house and dumps it down in Munchkin Land. The first thing she says, after her understatement that "I have feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" is "We must be over the Rainbow." This should be great – she got her wish! But no, a few minutes later all she wants to do is get back to Kansas. Granted, the Wicked Witch of the West isn't helping things, but shouldn't she be checking things out a little bit in the place that she was longing to be? Well, anyway, the local Zen Master Glinda says it's pretty easy – there's a Wizard that knows everything, and it's a very simple Path – just follow the Yellow Brick Road.

So she starts off down the road, and a little bit later it isn't quite so simple: the Path has a fork in it. What's up with that – what does "follow the yellow brick road" mean when it has two ways to go? She stands there wondering.
Dorothy: Now which way do we go?
Scarecrow: Pardon me, this way is a very nice way.
Dorothy: Who said that? [Toto barks at scarecrow]
Dorothy: Don't be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don't talk.
Scarecrow: [points other way] It's pleasant down that way, too.
Dorothy: That's funny. Wasn't he pointing the other way?
Scarecrow: [points both ways] Of course, some people do go both ways


The Scarecrow must have Unitarian tendencies. Well, Dorothy and the Scarecrow get through their introductions, and he joins on to her quest to go get help from the Wizard. They dance off down the Yellow Brick Road, singing the first rendition of their travelling song:
(Choir interrupts, directed vigorously by choir leader)

We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
You'll find he is a whiz of a Wiz If ever a Wiz there was.
If ever oh ever a Wiz there was The Wizard of Oz is one because,
Because, because, because, because, because.
Because of the wonderful things he does…..

(Choir leader, stopping them in mid-song): Wait! What did you say? Because, because, because? You're going off to see a Wizard and the only reason you can give for this trip is "because"?
(She turns back to preacher):

Great. This sounds promising. We're off to see a Wizard whose only positive attributes are the same as Mom's answer to the three year old who keeps asking "Why?" "Because!" Just "Because," with no reasoning or evidence behind it.

So Dorothy continues onward. She picks up a couple of more seekers on her Path to the Emerald City and they suffer some misadventures. But finally they arrive. Then they have more another telling interaction about the nature of the Wizard:

[Dorothy knocks]

Guardian of the Emerald City Gates: Well, that's more like it! Now, state your business!

Dorothy: [Dorothy and friends, all together] We want to see the Wizard!

Guardian: [gasps] The Wizard? But nobody can see the Great Oz! Nobody's ever seen the Great Oz! Even I've never seen him!

Dorothy: Well, then how do you know there is one?

Guardian: Oh, you're wasting my time!

Only when Dorothy establishes her credentials by way of the talisman of the Red shoes are she and the others admitted. We find out that those in the Emerald City don't actually do any work, and even though the Guardian has let them in, they still aren't going to be able to see the Wizard. Finally the Doorman relents, and the see Oz the Great and Powerful, who dismisses them with an impossible task to prove that they are worthy – get the broom of the wicked witch.

When they return after surprisingly accomplishing this feat, he tells them to return tomorrow.

Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz? You ungrateful creatures!  Think yourselves lucky that I'm giving you an audience tomorrow, instead of twenty years from now!

Still we're being stonewalled by the Great and Powerful Wizard. But when un-curtained by Toto, the Scarecrow expresses our outrage: "You Humbug." The Wizard agrees.  Then Dorothy says "You're a very bad man", but the Wizard protests. "Oh, no, my dear. I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad Wizard." He is right.

What does the wizard give to Dorothy's three companions? Depending on how you look at it, he gives them nothing, or a great deal. He gives them three silly symbolic gifts. He most definitely does not give them a brain, a heart or courage. They have already demonstrated these qualities during their quest – it was the Scarecrow who tricked the apple trees into giving up their apples by taunting the trees; the Woodman has been emoting every chance he gets; and when Dorothy and Toto are trapped in the Witch's castle, the Lion overcomes his fear to volunteer to go in and rescue her. So the Wizard could not and did not bestow these qualities on the Three. Yet his gifts have power - they all felt like they received what they were looking for from him. So what did they receive? The Wizard comes from the culture of travelling carnival or circus, and fortune tellers. Successful carnivals, circuses, magicians, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, astrologers and confidence men have no magic. What they do have is insight into human nature. The Wizard recognizes the qualities already possessed by the Scarecrow, Woodman, and Lion, and gives them symbolic gifts that provide self-affirmation. This is not too different from what a good psycho-therapist does. There is no magic, and no one can "give" us anything that suddenly provides a brain, a heart, or courage – the most someone can do is help to provide self-awareness of our own natures. So in one sense, he gave them nothing. But he gave them self-validation – a little bit enlightenment.

Dorothy also had to reach her own bit of enlightenment – she's been able to go home all along, she just has to realize that she wants to.

So the inhabitants of the Land of Oz have it both right and wrong. Someone new came to their land that saw things differently. They decided he must be a Great and Powerful Wizard. The Wizard is not unique. We humans have a habit of creating very bad Wizards from very good men. I am going to talk about a few others.

Siddhartha Gautama delivered a message about spiritual practice. The message is both simple and deep. He gave truths and paths which can lead to a cessation of suffering and achieve self-awakening. But people could not leave that alone. The message was modified so that some branches of Buddhism became a salvation message via ritual practices. Temples and huge statues of the Buddha were erected across Asia. Nothing in the Four Nobles Truths or the Noble Eightfold Path says anything about building temples to Buddha, or chanting his name to reach paradise. The profound message of the Buddha was decorated with icons and rituals.

Jesus had another simple, radical, and hard message: love and justice. But this wasn't good enough, oh no - when his message hit the Greco-Roman world, they turned Jesus into God. Not a new God, mind you; but a mystical three-for-the-price-of-one God – the old one of the Jews, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit thrown in to make it be a trinity. Why a Trinity? Religions seem to like threes. The Greeks had the three Fates – Clotho, Lacheseis, and Atopos, who spin, measure, and cut the thread of life. Hindus have Trimurti: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. The Christians took it one better. This Trinity somehow represented both the monotheistic innovation of the Jews with three mystically separate but not separate persons inside. It's a pretty good magic trick. The Romans took this new Trinitarian God and made it their state religion. But like any government, they decided that if they were going to have a state religion they needed to pin down what it was all about, and came up with a creed to define it. Several creeds, actually. Anybody who disagreed was a heretic.

I pondered this pattern: take a message and build it up into a religion with icons and magic, and thought hmm, not everybody does it - the Jews managed to avoid it. Oh, wait a minute, they didn't. Remember? While Moses was away on the mountain, the Israelites decided that they needed something to worship and built the golden calf. When Moses came back, he was so angry that he broke the tablets of the Ten Commandments, went through the camp the sons of Levi and killed three thousand of the Israelites, and then he had to go up the mountain again and ask God for a new set of tablets. "And you Israelites had better stay good this time - if I come down and see something like again, somebody's really going to get it.") So the creation story of Judaism has a very powerful cautionary tale against creating images and complicating the simple idea of an invisible monotheistic god. Much later, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, some Jews started down the path of giving the Ten Commandments to an iconic status – reciting them each day in the synagogue, and arguing that the Ten Commandments were the only important part of the Law. This was countered by discontinuing their daily recitation. So we see the tendency in Judaism also, but they have an antidote.

As an aside, Unitarian history also comes into this story. The original Unitarian martyrs – Francis David in Hungary, Michael Servetus in France – weren't burned at the stake because they advocated loving one another and tolerating other viewpoints. Their crime was reading the New Testament in the original Greek, and concluding that there wasn't anything in there about Jesus being God. They were killed because they denied the Trinity – they said Jesus wasn't God. This really didn't go down well with the Christian hierarchy. They thought they had settled all this back in 325 A.D. Once a church has established itself as Great and Powerful, it doesn't like people challenging the established order.

So back to the main story. In Oz, Buddhism, Christianity, and even Judaism, we see a pattern. Someone with a different, new message appears. We ignore their simple message and instead turn them into an idol, a god, or decide they have magical powers. The simple message is still there, but it has been hidden behind a guardian, a doorman, and a curtain. Somehow we humans act out this pattern over and over.
Let me introduce two terms: a "salvific message" and a "salvific figure." The word salvific means "providing salvation or redemption." Various teachers, religions and cultures have their own version of a salvific message. For example, Buddha offers a personal path to escape from suffering. Jesus offers a better way of living together with love and justice. But we often take the bearer of the salvific message and turn them into a salvific figure – and then instead of focusing on the message, we focus on the figure. I suggest that one reason we do this is that it absolves us of really listening to the message. If the person who brings the salvific message is really, truly different from us, then they are capable of thoughts and feats that we cannot achieve. We can worship them instead of listening to them. If Buddha and Jesus are different from you and me, then we can take a call to release ourselves from all cravings, or to love your neighbor as yourself, as something that only a supernatural being can achieve. If Jesus and Buddha are human beings like ourselves, their message is much more challenging – we are called to follow the same path as these role models.

My inspiration for this sermon was a series of conversations with other church members about our church's search for a new minister. It seemed to me several times that there was an attitude that things would get fixed, or we would figure things out, once we got a new minister – they would know what to do. But a minister is not a wizard. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, and we are already part way down the Yellow Brick Road. But what do we expect from the minister? Do we expect that she or he will have magical answers to the problems that we have not figured out? What will be in those answers that we aren't already capable of? Like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, a minister can't give us anything we don't already have. I do not suggest that a church does not need a minister – it is good to have someone whose focus and training is on religious and spiritual issues for individuals and the community. But we've been doing church for a long time now; if we have been listening, we have learned some lessons already. We have already identified some issues and desires as part of the interim minister process. There is no need for these to be in limbo until a settled minister appears. As a self-governing community, we will have to address these now or later – why not do some of it now? Simply pretend that I have bestowed all of you with a heart, and a brain, and courage – that you already have.

General Comments on Worship

1. A worship service means something and is important. Worship has the power to educate, inspire, and move people. It is not a business meeting, a lecture, or a seminar; it is an attempt to create sacred space and time.
2. Good worship is essential to nourish existing and attract new members of the community.
3. There are things that belong and do not belong in a worship service. I could use modern, sensitive language and say that not some things are "not appropriate" in a worship service; but let's say what I really mean: some things are good and some things are bad in a worship service.
4. We must strive to have all components of worship be excellent, every time. Doing less is a failure in our covenant with each other.
5. We expect consistent quality in other areas of our life.
   1. Suppose you are making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a child. You make it with care, trying to make it the way the child likes it. Every time. Is church less important than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
   2. Or when you go a potluck, each person brings food they think other people will enjoy. You understand that different people have different cooking skills and money to spend on their contribution; but we expect that they will put in some thought, time or resources. Is church less important than a potluck? How many bad potlucks would you go to before you gave up that group?
6. People come to church in spite of the service. I am not alone in this. We have been doing this for years. But if we believe what we did mattered, we would not allow it to be not good. We act as if getting along is more important than having it be good.

All this does not mean that every worship service has to be a peak experience. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is just a sandwich, after all. If you are starving, it can be life-sustaining. But other times it is simple comfort food.

Lou Pritchett is Scared

I received this one from my sister. She wrote:

You're so good at responding to these kinds of things, I thought I should send this one to you.

OK, the pressure is on.  Here is my attempt.

I. The message sent to me

----- Original Message -----
From: Neil
To:
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 8:36 AM
Subject: FW: Please Read this Letter


By the way, I did check this out on Snopes and it is there.
_____________________________________________
Letter from Procter & Gamble Exec to Obama

Please read, even if you are an Obama fan.  It is legitimate,  written by respected, Lou Prichett, formerly of Proctor and Gamble.   Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America's true living legends- an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world's  highest rated speakers. Successful corporate executives everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change management. Lou  changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as "partnering." Pritchett rose from  soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for  Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history.
 _______________________________________
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America ' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of  the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest  standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8  years.

Lou Pritchett

TRUE - CHECK:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/youscareme.asp

This letter was sent to the NY Times but they never acknowledged  it. Big surprise!  Since it hit the internet, however, it  has had  over 500,000 hits.  Keep it going..  All that is necessary for evil  to succeed is that good men do nothing.  It's happening right now.

II. My Response
As usual, there are two approaches to responding to a screed such as this: item by item, or the argument in its entirety. The item by item approach has been done by a couple of other bloggers. This one is pretty good:  http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/lou-pritchet-you-make-me-fear-for-my-nation-an-open-letter-to-lou-pritchett/  There is no particular reason for me to do another.

A side note on the internet conception of "truth" - the forwarder of this email says "this is true - see Snopes". What Snopes confirms is that yes, in fact a man named Lou Pritchett did write the original letter. That merely documents the attribution of the letter, not the truth of its contents. It's amazing how much stuff is believed true because "I read it on the Internet."

On to the big picture. After we read this item, what do we conclude? Lou says he’s scared. He starts every statement that way. He’s trying to get us to be scared. Really scared. Really really scared. It doesn’t matter what the reason is or if there is any logic behind the statements; we are just supposed be scared. Instead of peddling soap, he’s peddling fear. (The letter has about the same intellectual depth as a soap ad.) We’re supposed to be afraid of Barrack Obama. Why does someone peddle fear? It’s an appeal to emotion, which is always done to short circuit our process of reason. Once we become afraid, we follow the call of the fear-mongers to whatever goals they are trying to achieve. A recurrent problem with democracy is that it requires mental participation by the citizens. That’s a lot harder that simply following the lead of a charismatic leader.

This has unfortunately been a persistent feature of the American right since FDR. Senator Joseph McCarthy told us that we had to be hysterically afraid of hidden communists. The Republican Party since 1968 engaged in the Southern Strategy: be afraid of blacks. It worked for them for a long time, but in 2008 it seems to have (hopefully) run its course. But for a fear-monger to succeed, it helps if his audience has some fears and anxieties that he can latch onto, magnify, and align with his own message. So we should consider Lou’s audience. What are their fears?

They have a lot to be afraid of. Many of them live in smaller towns. Let’s face it; small town America is dying, period. There only jobs there for their children are dead-end. So their kids get an education and leave for the (evil) cities; or they stay in the small town with a low-paying job. So the older generation sees their way of life dying; the younger generation sees no future. (As a footnote, there is a parallel in the 19th century – the introduction of the McCormick reaper and other technologies meant that far fewer people could produce the same amount of grain, farming jobs disappeared, grain prices fell with increasing production, and farmers fell into debt. The great demagogue of the time was William Jennings Bryan, whose proposed solution was deliberate inflation so that farmers could repay their debts in cheaper dollars. The enemy was the industrial cities.) Today the enemies now are still the people in the cities, particularly on the three Coasts - East, West, and North Coast (the cities along the Great Lakes - Chicago et al.) These places are where their children leave to, and are filled with lots of "other" people. They "other" doesn't live like "us." Attacking the other has always been a good demagogic strategy - whether Pericles against the Spartans, Hitler against the Jews, or Lou Pritchett against a black man in the White House.

So there a lot of people who are afraid, and the demagogues are playing to their fears. Now we ask a very important Latin phrase: cui bono - who benefits? (We have all those old Latin phrases because none of this is new - the Romans saw it all before.) There are two obvious gains from being a fear-monger: status or power. Status: you can draw attention to yourself as the one who sees the danger - the boy who cried wolf, or McCarthy with his secret list of Communists. Or power: if you can ramp up the fear and get people to follow you, you have the rabble behind you and can use it for political power. (Pick your own list of historical antecedents here.) The latter reason is what lies beneath all the decibels on the American right: be afraid, and follow us.

For the right-wing faction made up of the unholy alliance of small-government conservatives and religious right, fear is all they have left to sell. To rephrase FDR, all we have to fear is the fear-mongers. To Lou Pritchett: when you have some logic to peddle instead of fear, come back and we can engage in discourse appropriate to a democratic republic.

Gratuitous Cheap-Shot Post Script
I know I shouldn't, and it cheapens my argument, but I could not resist the two following observations.

The preface to the letter describes Lou Pritchett as a respected author, speaker, etc. I have not heard of him before, and a search on the Net mostly reveals references to this letter. No Wikipedia entry, which you can find for almost anybody semi-famous. There is a web page by the company that flogs him for speaking engagements ($15K to $25K a pop), and that’s about it. He wrote one book. He’s a soap salesman who negotiated with Wal-Mart, and renamed getting pushed around by Wal-Mart “partnering”. (I'm sure you can think of other words for that relationship.) He retired in 1986; now he's just a cranky old white guy that is looking for some attention.

What also comes to mind is Eddie Murphy's cowboy bar scene in "48 Hours":  "I'm your worst f---ing nightmare, man. I'm a nigger with a badge."  Like Jimmy Carter, I can't help but feel that some of the response to Obama has a (scared) racist undertone.