Religious Liberalism and Theology: March 2006 Archives

Its Friday afternoon, and it has been a busy week. Tomorrow is a board meeting, and I will be proposing that the congregations leadership must discuss some contentious issues.

1) Why they should become a fair compensation congregation.

2) Why they should develop a policy on how to handle disruptive people.

Of course neither of those topics have anything to do with my sermon topic for Sunday, "Satan Reconsidered." I just finished it.

I will be able to spend some time after the Board meeting with my packet preparation. Getting ready to move on has added to my "to do" list.

Tomorrow is the first of April, and during April I will travel to three separate cities for important meetings. And the search for an interim position will become intense.

I am preparing a sermon on Evil, and on that personification of evil, Satan. Seems like a perfectly ordinary Unitarian Universalist topic to me.

Explore Evil, talk about "evils" and the idea of Evil itself. Introduce the Prince of Darkness and talk about his history in Hebrew Scriptures and early Christianity.

Help the listeners decide whether they believe in an array of evils, or whether their is something to the idea of Evil itself. Contrast this to non Western non-dualisms.

I mention this topic to some of my colleagues and they wondered how I could get away with that topic in a UU church. The devil and Evil, next you'll be preaching about Sin and Redemption. Well Passion 'sunday is coming up, and Easter too.

I do get away with it. I think it is because I use words like "Let me suggest..." and "or you might look at this way."

No witnessing. Much probing.

A Sermon on Global Warming given in Stuart, Florida on March 19, 2006

Preached at the Treasure Coast Unitarian Universalist Church in Stuart, Florida on March 5th 2006

Yesterday, I was talking with a retired minister about Florida.  The subject drifted from native plants to native people, and what we knew about Florida before 1491.  I expressed my opinion that "indigenous wisdom" has much to teach us, and he expressed surprise.  "You mean that you think there is something behind all that superstition," he said, "aren't you romanticizing the past?"  The liberal clergy have had a love affair with modernism, and many continue to suffer under the prejudice that all thinking by pre - Enlightenment people was irrational and not worth serious consideration.

I have been thinking a lot about "indigenous wisdom" lately.  The Six Nations (Iroquois) told stories about the "three sisters" which were corn, squash, and beans.  They told how these three food plants were gifts to the people, how the people learned to care for and cultivate these together, and the stories told the people that the cosmos was broken when three sisters were not grown together.

Superstition?

We now know of that corn, squash, and beans provide complimentary proteins, provide a balance of fibers and complex carbohydrates, and planting them together provides a natural nitrogen depletion and renewal cycle thus contributing to a sustainable agriculture.

The so called science advanced by modernism is based on reductionism,  breaking things into smaller and smaller mechanism.  But the observations of the indigenous people led to wisdom, because it was based on seeing connections.

The illustration is from Cooking with the Three Sisters.

I have been writing a sermon on the Feminine Mystique this week. I have had my share of meetings and pastoral consultations, and my phone calls and the oh so urgent email. But a lot of the week has been engaged in sermon writing.

It is like that every week I write a sermon, but this week is a little different. I lot of energy went into writing the sermon. Usually I have energy to spare.

I read the book back in 1963. I have changed and the world has changed since then, so reading the book was an exploration of those changes. I could only touch on them in the sermon, but I have meditated on changes all week. There was no "women's movement' in 1963, this book is credited with igniting what was to be an explosion. I remember the explosion, it was a few years later. The women's caucuses, the demands. I was working in the peace movement. I was supporting the Black Empowerment Movement. Yes the demands were just, but we have to stop the napalm from falling, can't this wait. Yes, I remember the demands.

And I remember the invitations to go to all male groups to talk about our feelings about feminism. I was for the demands, now I have to talk about my feelings? Why? Yea NOW. Now let me free Angela Davis. Isn't that more pressing? Her trial is coming up. So this week some old conflicted feelings were revisited.

But what took most of the energy was confronting Freud once again. She argues against Freud's understanding of women. I had forgotten that that was an issue. Struggling with Freud was important back then, but does anyone take drive / repression seriously as a dynamic anymore? But that was the orthodoxy then, to think psychology was to think of ego and id, and most of my congregants were educated before the Freud was critiqued out of favor. And it was the feminists beginning with Friedan who led the charge against that idea system.

How to develop that in a sermon? Ah ha! Good old Margaret Fuller to the rescue, talk of androgyny! She was way ahead on the idea that the nature of human beings both men and women was to express themselves creatively. On the other hand, Freud assumes an essentialist distinction between men and women. Contrasting those ideas made my journey in "human nature" less a chore, but for a while I was stuck. It wasn't a history of the flaming chalice sermon.

I think this sermon that I just finished is simple enough to keep everyone with me, and challenging enough to keep me wanting to preach again.

Its that time of the year. Twelve more to go!