 peating. In the country of Uganda, which is in Africa, people used to use pieces of bark, tree bark, to make cloth with. And they would pound that bark until it was very, very thin and very soft and very flexible. And then they would decorate it with these attractive, intricate, colorful patterns. And this is actually a piece of cloth made out of bark from Africa. And in Africa, when people wanted something really, really good to eat, well, they didn't necessarily go for candy. But they liked nothing better than big, delicious fried ants with their white wings cut off. Now, that may not sound very appetizing to any of us, but certain kind of ants in Uganda grow to be very, very large. And when they are fried up, you know what they taste like? Shrimp. It tastes like shrimp. But these big ants can only be found twice a year when the rainy season begins in Uganda. And that's what makes them even more special as a treat. And here's a big bowl of fried ants. Yummy, yes. Well, there was this man in Uganda who made his living by selling that bark cloth that I showed you. And there was another man that made his living by selling fried ants. And these two men lived in different villages, so they had never met each other. Now, one day, the man who sold bark cloth had an idea about how he could earn some extra money. It wasn't a very nice idea. He collected a whole bunch of useless, old, dirty rags, rolled them up. And then he wrapped a couple of layers of beautiful bark cloth around those old rags and tied the whole thing up with a pretty bark cloth ribbon. The bundle looked like a big roll of fancy bark cloth, but of course, in reality, it was what? Mostly rags. Very much pleased with his cleverness, the man put his bundle onto his shoulder and he walked to the marketplace, which was very much like our own farmer's markets in the nearby city of Kajungo. Now, the other man who sold the ants also thought of a trick that he could play to bring in some extra money. He had lots and lots of ant wings, which weren't any good for eating, but he didn't have left very many of those delicious fried ants. So he, too, made this big bundle, made out of strong, fresh banana leaves, and inside, he put all those old ant wings and he covered those wings up with some more banana leaves. Then on top of that, he put a few of those big, juicy ants and then he covered it all up again. And then he, too, put the bundle on his shoulder and he walked to that marketplace in Kajungo. And there in the marketplace, it just so happened that the two men were sitting across from each other with many other vendors who were there to sell their products. And opening his bundle partway, the man with the bark cloth began saying, who wants to buy some beautiful bark cloth? And he would say it over and over again to try to attract customers to buy his cloth from him. And then opening his bundle partway, the other man spread a few of those ants on the banana leaf and he called out, who wants to buy some of my delicious fried ants? But you know what? After several hours, no one had bought either that bark cloth or any of the fried ants. And the man who was selling the cloth, well, he was tired and he was getting really, really hungry. So he had seen this man with the ants across from him and he said to him, I don't wanna buy any of your ants but I'll tell you what I'll do. I will exchange this big bundle of bark cloth for your ants. Now it wouldn't be a very good bargain for me. You would have the advantage here but I am just famished and I really have to have something to eat. Now the man with the ants, he thought for a minute and said, you know what? This really is a good deal. Think about it, just a few fried ants and I get this big bundle of bark cloth. And so he agreed to make the exchange. Now each of those men tried to hide their excitement over the bargain that they had made. Without any words, they traded those two bundles and each one set off for his own home village. So you can imagine your surprise when they got home and each of them opened their bundles. And the people of Uganda often tell this story about the two cheats whenever anyone in that country tries to be dishonest. And they say to each other, remember the man with the ants? Remember the man with the bark cloth? Remember what happened to them at the Kajungo Marketplace? So that's the story of the two cheats and perhaps it is a lesson that we probably shouldn't try to cheat because it might come back to haunt us, right? And not in the Halloween sense of that word. So we're gonna have you go to class now if there are any classes this afternoon, which there are, Rachel says that there are and we're going to sing you out with our next Tim, number 182. Please be seated and we continue now with the reading that Carol Rowan is going to deliver. This is a personal story from Virginia Reiner. Was used to being the only woman in a room full of scientists and engineers, but this was my first visit to the male dominated world of a corporate command center. The attorney who had arranged the meeting escorted me in. A technical communications consultant, I'd been hired to turn reams of environmental impact data into a report for the government. The five executives all wore dark traditional suits. I could see a green courtyard outside the window. The art on the walls was impeccable and unevocative. We were here to review my draft report, which was strictly factual with no speculation, judgments, predictions, or interpretations. Any perceived breach of scientific objectivity had been quickly brought to my attention by a horde of earlier reviewers. Still, the data revealed that the product at issue was having an unforeseen unintended consequence for the environment. Is there a legal obligation to report all the data? Someone asked. After deciding the answer was no, the group meticulously weeded out any information the company was not specifically required by law to disclose. The public will just have to trust us on the rest, the man chairing the meeting pronounced. Why should the public trust the company? I asked. The chairman's head jerked back as if I'd thrown a glass of ice water in his face, but his voice remained sonorous and steady. Excuse me, what did you say? I repeated the question slowly, without any trace of emotion. I said, why should the public trust the company? His lips drew into a thin line, and he studied me intently, really seeing me for the first time. After a few minutes of silence, someone inquired about the revised draft. It was decided that I would make the changes discussed and have another draft ready in two weeks. As I got up to leave, all the men stood and thanked me politely for my hard work. The attorney hastily escorted me out. The second reading is from Jacob Needleman's book, Why Can't We Be Good? And Needleman, for many years, has been a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. I don't know in which class I first tried it. I remember only that I was trying to introduce the general subject of ethics, and that I was operating under the assumption that everyone in the class more or less understood the meaning of that word, and that everyone had his or her personal experience to draw on in order to think about it. And so when I asked for examples of ethical dilemmas or conflicts from the students' own lives, without their going into too much personal detail, I was bewildered by the fact that not only did no one offer to speak, but that no one seemed to understand what I was talking about. It even seemed that they had no concrete idea of what the word ethics really meant. How was that possible, I asked myself? Obviously, such situations had occurred in their lives, as they do in everyone's life. Situations where one is painfully obliged to choose a course of action without being sure whether it is right or wrong, or where one knows what is right, but is strongly inclined to do otherwise, or where there is a sharp disagreement between oneself and another person about good or bad in any given life situation. So why had these students become uncharacteristically tongue-tied? It was not as if I was asking them to divulge intimate secrets. I was only asking them for ethical generalities, but then I began remembering certain things about my students. Over the years, it had always been like this, that they would approach the subject of ethics, of good and evil, of right and wrong, and almost always they would speak about whether something made them feel good or made them feel bad or feel guilty. Not whether or not they were guilty, but whether or not they felt guilty. Not whether or not it was good or bad, but only whether it felt good or bad. In our modern world, it is very much the fashion to deny the existence of absolutes in the ethical sphere. And anyone who dares even ask seriously about this possibility is often branded as naive or fanatical. Who's to say what is good or bad, right or wrong? What's good in one place for one person may be bad in another place for another person. Many of our children, and almost all those students of mine, simply accept without any second thought that all morality is relative to time, place, ethnicity, religion, social class, nationality, and so forth. And this moral relativism is very seldom called into question. So that much I understood about my students' opinions and beliefs concerning moral values. But what I had not seen until now was the possibility that partly because of this fixed relativistic mindset that they had never experienced as such the genuinely ethical element of human life. Although they had obviously faced situations involving ethical choices and ethical demands, such situations were in their consciousness intimately translated into matters simply of what feels good or feels bad. And so was the experience of the ethical, I ask myself, momentously disappearing from our world, like some great endangered natural species. Lovely harmony, my friends. Thank you. Now, I did not grow up in a conventionally Christian home, far from it. And yet the connotations of the word sin were obvious. It was clearly associated in my mind and in the minds of many others as well, with, well, you know what, sex. Sex outside of marriage was sinful. Sex with someone of the same gender, likewise. And of course, sexual self-gratification was sinful and unhealthy to boot. Now, I knew, of course, that stealing, cheating, lying, physical abuse and other such acts were ethically inappropriate, but somehow they did not strike me as sinful. So tightly had the connection been forged between sex and sin. Now, for strictly observant Roman Catholics, indulging in sex for any purpose beyond procreation was and in certain quarters still is deemed to be licentious and therefore impermissible. It could be argued that this association has been largely responsible for giving sin such a bad name. And with the result that many people today find it off-putting. As the philosopher George Dennis O'Brien remembers, there were moments in my education from the Catholic Christian brothers when I had the distinct impression that the entire point of the creation of the sun, the moon and the stars, the journeys of the patriarchs, the flights out of Egypt, the proclamations of the prophets, the New Testament, the pageant of the popes, all of this was simply arranged to stamp out smooching. Never has so much earnestness been devoted to so little effect. And the curious thing about this is that Jesus himself, not to mention the great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah, they had little if anything to say about sexual practices and proclivities. True, there are those rare passages in Leviticus and in the stray Pauline epistle endlessly referenced by biblical literalists that condemn certain kinds of sexual activity. And it is true that Augustine of Hippo did hold sex responsible for the fatal transmission of sin from Adam and Eve to the entire human race, thus casting a permanent paw on anything that happened between the sheets. But in this age, our age of carnal knowledge, these Augustinian ideas, these Pauline ideas strike many of us as prudish and representative of a pre-scientific and for the most part an unenlightened outlook. If this is what constitutes sin, then we will have nothing to do with it and the invasions of privacy that that concept seems to sanction. Which is not to say that with respect to sex, anything goes. Consenting uncoerced sex between adults discreetly enjoyed should not be the subject of moral strictures. But rape, molestation, abusive sex, that's something else again, acts for which the term sinful is probably not too strong. But what we need to understand though is that the emphasis Christianity and the larger Christian culture have placed on sexual iniquity, this has never been universally accepted. And thus for Jesus and for the prophets, sin had much more to do with the exploitation of the poor and callousness toward the disadvantaged than with any kind of sexual intimacy. The word itself in Hebrew, chata, translates roughly as to miss the mark or more accurately to stray from the path of righteousness. Now today, and in the absence of the language of sin, we use other terminology, immorality, unethical conduct, anti-social behavior, or in more clinical terms of the harmful and manipulative actions associated with certain personality disorders like narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathic. And since we have developed these alternatives, why should we even consider revisiting an outdated and widely rejected concept like sin? The short answer, offered by the psychologist Carl Medinger, among others, is personal responsibility. The term is unambiguous, whereas most substitutes for sin contain loopholes that allow us to rationalize or to excuse ourselves. Sinful is the appropriate label for those instances where we clearly have missed the mark of knowingly engaged and deleterious acts or when we refuse to act when the well-being of others is on the line. The first, when we knowingly act in an inappropriate way, that's called a sin of commission, of which the Boston Marathon bombings provide a vivid example. The second, we call a sin of omission, the refusal perhaps to divulge information about the potentially harmful environmental effects of the product. The fact is, too many people in today's world do not seem to be aware that certain behaviors are indeed inappropriate, irresponsible, and that they are having the effect of creating a culture that is severely ethically challenged. As the former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously observed, in today's free enterprise system, there have never been so many ways to cut corners. Over and over again, we observe that while powerful institutions and powerful people may be willing to follow the letter of the law, often laws that they help to craft for their own advantage, these same folks are not terribly concerned about doing the right thing. An activity or an enterprise may be unethical, but that doesn't matter as long as it is legally defensible. But the test of true ethics, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner observed, the test of true ethics is responsibility independent of one's particular niche or stake in the outcome. Now muddled thinking in the area of ethics and morality is hardly restricted to the captains of industry or to politicians in high places. The conversations that Jacob Needleman had with his San Francisco State University students, they revealed that for the most part, they lacked a clear sense of right and wrong. Often their morality simply boiled down to gut feelings, ethical choices, ethical demands Needleman noticed immediately were translated into matter of whether they simply felt good or felt bad. And so largely absent were any ethical reference points, any behavioral baselines. Although imbued thoroughly imbued with this relativistic outlook, they had never experienced Needleman says, as such the genuinely ethical element of human life. Now feeling is don't get me wrong feeling is important. To at least some degree, we need to trust our feelings in the process of weighing our behavioral options. But feelings are never enough. Subjectivity is never enough. There have to be standards of some sort. The Dalai Lama says that with respect to ethics, we must chart a path that avoids the extremes of accrued absolutism on the one hand and a trivial relativism on the other hand. Part of the problem here is that we may have leaned just a little bit too far into the territory of activism. In a poll of 30,000 students conducted in 2008, two-thirds 20,000 of them admitted that they had cheated in a class at some point in the past year. Almost one-third said that they had stolen something from a store in the past year. Too many young Americans, Howard Gardner-Lamance, seem to lack an ethical compass that governs their behavior. He had conducted informal reflection sessions with young people at various high schools and colleges throughout the country. He typically asked these students to name someone whose life or whose principles they truly admire. Passing over most of those well-known public figures, the students would often refer to someone with whom they shared a personal connection, a grandparent, a teacher, a coach. But then Gardner would ask, identify someone that you do not admire. And the students were suddenly very, very reticent. In one such session, Gardner reports, I could not even get the students to state that Adolf Hitler should be featured on the not-to-be-desired list. As one student murmured, well, he did do some good things for Germany. Now, despite their lack of clarity on the subject and their reluctance to pass judgment, most of our young people are not going to get into serious trouble. They are not going to stray too far from acceptable social norms. And if their powers of ethical reasoning are stunted, the blame probably doesn't lie with them. We adults, Gardner says, we need to look at ourselves in the mirror. Because if the standards in our society have become lax, it's because we have served as less and adequate role models and been remiss in addressing unacceptable actions. Now, at this point, it should be noted that the proper term to apply to particular moral or ethical lapses may not be sin. That may not be the right word. Even the best of us occasionally will reveal that we have feet of clay. And if we are honest, we must admit that some of our actions in our life have been a cause for some fairly serious regret. But not every misstep is a sin, an ethical transgression perhaps, but usually for most of us, an aberration in our normal behavior. Generally speaking, particular discrete indiscretions don't deserve to be labeled as sinful. Rather, that term should be reserved for an attitude, an outlook that leads to a succession of unacceptable acts. And thus, a serial cheater is a sinner. Whereas the person who cheats once but then thinks better of it is probably not. According to Carl Managers, sin reflects a pattern of behavior that is defined by arrogance, self-sufficiency, and callousness. So take, for instance, the seven deadly sins. It isn't sinful for a child or for an adult to over-indulge in Halloween treats even though that could technically qualify as gluttonous behavior. But a rare binge on candy does not make a gluttonous person. The deadly sins as their proponents understood them represented these deeply embedded character flaws characterized by self-centeredness and a lack of interest in and concern for other people. Sinfulness described a lifestyle in which pride, anger, lust, sloth, envy, greed, or gluttony were chronic features. According to George Dennis O'Brien, the decision for sin is not first a decision for a bad action. It's the wrong decision about who I am. Similarly, Tibetan Buddhism teaches that any given pattern of behavior will be determined by the individuals Kun Long, their overall state of heart and mind. When Kun Long is wholesome, the Dalai Lama says, it follows that our actions themselves will be ethically wholesome. Now as a Unitarian Universalist, this idea has a very familiar ring to it. In the late 19th and early 20th century, salvation by character was a staple of Unitarian theology. And it represented a clear departure from the protested concept of salvation by faith. Our forebears were convinced that character formation, that was the key to producing decent upright behavior, and it became for those forebears the principal task and mission of a Unitarian congregation. Now it could be argued that today there's not been a whole lot in the way of character formation, that we have embraced certain attitudes and possess a sense of self that an earlier generation of writers would clearly have classified as sinful. Take our governments increasing reliance on drones that seek out and destroy our enemies in the Middle East. Writing in the New York Review of Books, David Cole, Professor of Constitutional Law Georgetown, describes these drones as, quote, the ultimate imperialist weapon projecting force in other countries without risking vulnerability. Drones, he goes on, inflict intense anxiety on those who live under their shadow, the vast majority of whom are innocent civilians, and therefore the drones inspire deep resentment. The fact that we can now kill individuals by remote control from half a world away, that does not mean that we should do so. The policy of using drones in this fashion reflects a pattern of behavior rather than an isolated military strategy. It is almost irresistible, the arrogance that comes over us when we see what we can do with our minds and our technology, Freeman, Dyson observes. And it's that attitude of arrogance with its Olympian assertion that whatever we do, whatever harm we inflict with our advanced technology is justifiable. It is that pattern of behavior and the mindset that smacks of sinfulness. Now writers on the subject often connect sin with an egocentric or selfish outlook that fails to take the welfare of other people fully into account. The sinful person is therefore deficient in empathy. According to Ken Wilber, sin is the result of a self-contraction. It is the activity of contracting and focusing on the individual self, the personal ego. Again, it is not something that the self does, it is something that the self becomes that the self is. Wilber's observation conforms to what I said earlier about the deadly sins and the self-centeredness that they reflect. But then to confine this analysis of sin to individuals and their predilections that misses another important part of the puzzle which has to do with who we are when we belong to a group. We are talking here about the willingness of individuals to abandon their own private scruples and their own private code of personal behavior in order to experience transcendence as part of a larger collective. It could be a religious community, a political party, a nation state. Describing those who followed Stalin in the 1930s and who were accomplices to his crime, Eileen Kelly says that these men and women sought to perfect themselves in line with party directives that were based on the Bolsheviks' claim to be the soul, to have the soul knowledge of history's path. One such person, Zenayda Denisovskaya in surrendering her own individuality claimed that she had been reborn as a loyal, obedient Stalinist she believed that she had found her true self. As a group member a person can make the wrong decision about who they are and in their desire to experience and to maintain a sense of solidarity with that group they may act in ways that as individuals they would have found utterly unacceptable. A more mundane example of this occurred a few years ago when a man named Matt Bellamy attended a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game and he came to that professional basketball game wearing a jersey bearing the name and the number of LeBron James. If you don't know LeBron James is a talented basketball player in the country right now. Now James had recently left Cleveland in order to play for the Miami Heat which struck many Cavaliers fans as an act of betrayal. So Bellamy comes into the auditorium, the stadium he is flaunting his jersey is roundly booed by the fans who begin pelting him with assorted food stuffs. That prompts the police to eject Bellamy for his own safety and as he was escorted to the exit the crowd applauded vigorously. They cheered his exit. Commenting on this episode David Sirota says that it was illustrative of a nation that for all of its constitutional rhetoric increasingly ignores that foundational document with its guarantee of freedom of speech. One of the reasons that evil blights our lives ifutuan rights is because we are often desperate to fill the emptiness at the core of our being with something that will help us to feel more real more substantial and more significant. In a consumer society that often means that we fill ourselves and our lives with more and more material possessions we identify ourselves with what we have, what we own but we also seek and find fulfillment in the embrace of a group and in the latter case we must be willing to a greater or lesser degree to conform to adopt the group norms as our own and sometimes when we do that the results are good but sometimes ifutuan warns it opens the door to tremendous evil. All of the foregoing aside I do not expect to see a recovery of the language of sin in my lifetime. If anything the more our society retreats from organized religion the less relevant that concept seems. But we do need something some compelling idea that will serve to stir up our moral imaginations and to renew in us our responsibility. Perhaps sin isn't the best choice but what then would help us to become more ethically grounded? In our post modern world perhaps perhaps a more lively sense of humor would suffice and James Hillman he says that what this would mean is a laughing recognition of our own absurdity in the human comedy that he says bans the devil as effectively as garlic or a steak in the heart I for one hope that James Hillman is right. Blessed be and amen. This is a weekend when we will be giving 100% of your gifts to the Unitarian Universal Service Committee that has been doing excellent work abroad and particularly helping to find solutions to the refugee crisis afflicting western Europe at this time. Please be generous. I invite you to join me now in the spirit of meditation. As October ends and autumn's last adamant leaves are whipped from their branches by the galloping wind as scarves and caps come out of storage and storm windows replace the screens that once invited summer into our homes. As squadrons of geese set out for southern destinations and earthbound squirrels hastened to provide against the dire straits of winter at such a time as this do our thoughts return to things past to life retreating and to life that is no more. A piece of us is never prepared for winter never reconciled to departure and to death. Long into November our hearts protest passing the end of warm days and fragrant nights shirt sleeve strolls along lush lake and river banks and likewise on this all hallows weekend images of old dear companions who once graced the summer of our lives crowd in upon our memories let us not be hasty to push them out again let us not be charry of the sadness and the regret that their presence evokes may these brave and lovely spirits live again in our tender thoughts for our recollections attest to their enduring importance proving that death and distance are powerless to sever the bonds that connect truly loving hearts. And now as is our custom I would have us recall those members and former members of First Unitarian Society who have passed away within the last year and these are their names William Burns Margaret Welke Arthur Hovey Janet Stonesifer Shirley Drayton Donna Hartshorne Robert Siegfried Helen Ranney Angie Volcker Mary Colner Henry Hart and Helen Klebaner let us now continue on with what you do rise once more in body and spirit as we close with the hymn number 10, Immortal Love T. Weston writes Autumn we know is life on route to death the asters are but harbingers of frost and the trees flaunting their colors to the sky in other times will follow where the leaves have fallen and so shall we and yet other lives will come so may we know and accept and embrace the mystery of life that we hold for a while may we not mourn that life outgrows each separate self but still rejoice that we have had our day let us lift high our own colors to the sky and give in our time fresh glory to the earth Amen Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Rachel may have to get rid of all three of us Not this year We'll worry about that Right now we're playing Like you say I've just dug up all the questions I never remember I don't know I don't know I have a wonderful time I was perhaps That's a nice name I know That's why I'm kind of surprised by the way the rain just fall and it's it's about 15 years and that's a really good name Bye-bye to have an extension but Mark Hayes purposely cut it off and trust his stuff but he's a quality I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I