Edward Albee's classic American play was brilliantly performed at the Guthrie Theater recently. What do these four troubled and troubling characters say about the principles of of liberal religious humanism, and what might our philosophy have to say to them?

We can understand the abundance of the universe in two ways; as an invitation to complacency, or as an invitation to generosity. And I want to suggest this morning that much depends upon that choice. For if we respond with complacency - if we merely accept all the creative energy and all the love and sacrifice that have made our own lives possible, then the abundance of the universe comes to a stop in us. If we choose to receive what we have concluded is our due - and even, perhaps, to complain that it is not given exactly as we would have preferred it - then we make ourselves something outside the process, something other than the ever-flowing stream of life; something transitory and futile and ultimately trivial. It is when we respond to the abundance of life with gratitude and with generosity that we become a part of that universal creativity; when we contribute our own energy to the flowing stream, then it fills us and pours out of us to others, so that the stream is enhanced.

In fact, it seems to me that the way in which Brooks characterizes the Bobos' spiritual values is in very many respects a quite accurate description of Unitarian Universalism. Have we not always championed freedom and equality, and cultivated an expressive individualism? Has not our religions tradition, throughout its history, opposed conformism, authoritarianism, and blind obedience? Isn't ongoing social reform and personal growth still our agenda? Have we not been persistent advocates for more choices, especially for people, like women and ethnic groups, whose choices had been arbitrarily limited? Sounds like us-us at our best-to me! Moreover, I think that Brooks is also correct in supposing that we are unlikely to renounce the gains that we have made in these areas. We are not about to roll back the cultural and political revolutions of the past decades, with their enhancement of personal freedom-not if we can help it. Yet I also believe that the challenge he describes us as facing is a real one. Let me put it just a shade differently from the way he states it; what has followed the toppling of old authorities has not been the glorious new dawn that some had predicted, but rather a sense of spiritual confusion and social breakdown. In the wake of the victory of choice over conformity, we are now in the position of seeking to rebuild connections. Freedom and choice are not everything; now, upon the ground that they have cleared for us, we must build our house of obligation. What are the things to which we are willing to commit ourselves? Is there anything worthy of our ultimate loyalty? What promises are we willing to make, and to keep?

One of the functions of religion is to remind human beings that none of us is the center of the universe. This is an ongoing project, because each of us has a tendency to believe that we are, in fact, the center of the universe. It takes the combined power of both reason and imagination to persuade ourselves that other people suffer as we suffer, have ideas as good as ours, and are entitled to the same recognition and respect that we crave for ourselves. The evolutionary pressures of genetics have shaped us in such a way that we usually like to be at the center of the universe with a few of our nearest and dearest relatives-our children, our sisters and brothers, our kinship network. In these people, we more easily recognize reflections of ourselves; we can believe, without too much trouble, that what goes on inside us, goes on inside them too. They share our language, our culture, our assumptions about things-they probably even look a lot like us. The more that other people do not look like us, do not speak as we do, are not shaped by the same habits of the heart, the harder it is for us to recognize their inherent humanity. This, in a nutshell, is the origin of racism; the belief that what I am is what a human being is supposed to be like, and everyone else is either a slightly flawed or a very flawed version of me. And when that conviction gets combined with legal and political, military and economic power, it becomes the toxic, pervasive, systemic evil of racism.

The Christmas season is a fascinating anachronism in late twentieth century American culture for many reasons. Not the least of these is its understanding of time. When does the Christmas season officially begin? Despite all our penchant for definitions and precision and rules, there is no clear concensus about exactly what constitutes "the holidays." Do they begin with the appearance of wrapping paper and tree ornaments at Walgreens, which is pretty much as soon as the Halloween candy goes? Is it the first phone call about which family member is hosting this year? Does the season begin when you sit down with a list and the mail order catalogues, or with the first trip to the mall in search of presents? Some would argue that officially it begins on the first day after Thanksgiving, and one person told me this year that it's my tree-trimming party that kicks it off. Others say the first of December, when the Advent calendar starts. For that matter, when does the Christmas season end? Is it over yet? Is it New Years Day, or the day the kids go back to school, or the traditional Feast of the Epiphany, or is it when the tree finally gets denuded and removed?

You are surprised to see me assume this crown, are you not? "Princess," they call me still; "Princess Isabella of Poland," as if I had never left the court of my father, as if I had never gone to Transylvania, as if I had never been a queen. But a queen I was; queen of a land surpassingly beautiful, queen of a people intelligent, loyal, and fierce in defense of their liberty. A queen hounded and driven from her place, this very crown wrested from me by enemies without and false friends near by, but a queen still. The mother of a King such as this world has seldom seen, and yet more rarely deserved, I was; but above all, the queen of a dream, the queen of an idea of the heart and soul that has transformed the world, and might transform it still.

Christmas, here at the turn of the millennium in the United States of America, is given a heavy responsibility. This one day is asked to contain almost all the enchantment that remains in our disenchanted culture. And the Christmas stories that we tell draw little if anything from the original Mary and Joseph and the baby in the manger images. Instead, they cluster around miracles, and Christmas becomes the day of miracles; the day when we are willing to entertain possibilities that we would deny on any other day.

Hunger is a challenge older than human existence, for it is the common struggle of all animal species to find enough to eat in order to stay healthy and to rear the next generation. In unfavorable climates or ecological situations, any species can experience starvation, and for most of human history, homo sapiens has been no exception. Hunger, like war, disease, and mortality itself, was long seen as an inevitable product of both natural and social calamities; to not be hungry was good fortune, and cause for gratitude-and most likely, temporary.

The pharmaceutical industry is closing in on a new approach that, in effect, takes the fun out of using so-called recreational drugs. At least five drug companies and several university scientists are testing "vaccines" for cocaine, phencyclidine (PCP), methamphetamine, and nicotine, according to Philip Cohen, writing in New Scientist, June 10, 2000. Like standard vaccines, these drugs program the body to produce immune-system proteins called antibodies. But instead of fighting off disease, these antibodies chemically disarm specific drugs in the bloodstream. Some keep the naughty drugs from reaching the brain, while others break them up into nonintoxicating chemical bits.

On an individual level, these new drugs offer hope to people who are struggling to quit smoking or snorting. But as potential new weapons in the war against drugs, Cohen argues, the vaccines come with a load of ethical questions. "Should people be vaccinated simply because they belong to a group thought to be particularly at risk of becoming addicted?" he writes. "Should parents be allowed to make that decision for their children?"

People join churches for lots of different reasons. People come to churches with lots of different stories, each bringing a history and a hope to this new affiliation. It is a commonplace among congregational consultants and church growth experts that these hopes and stories, these reasons why people join, are significantly changed from what they were two generations ago. Once upon a time, or so they say, people joined churches because that was what they had been raised to do; because it was an expected thing, and more or less everyone else did it too. People joined either a congregation of the same denomination in which they had grown up - if not, indeed, the same church in which they had grown up - or else something not very different that was handy to where they found themselves living. It was part of the package, like finding a dentist, and getting registered to vote. They might appreciate the minister's sense of humor, or particularly enjoy the choir; they might grumble about the organist or the drafty building, but these were facts of life, not causes for action; they did not constitute reasons to look, or not look, elsewhere for a religious community.

There may be no institution in the world with a longer future time horizon than the traditional British university. The story is told of a particular college - I forget now whether it was at Oxford or Cambridge - which built an impressive new hall, around the time of Jefferson's presidency. Running across the width of the great common room, with its carved paneling and its leaded windows, supporting the slate roof with its dormers, were twenty massive beams of oak, hewn from the great trees of the English forests. Everything about this building was designed to endure for centuries, and so it did, sheltering generations of scholars, standing impassive through wars and recessions, through the death of kings and the advances of science, old fashioned and a bit drafty, but unmoved. In the end, of course, it is the little things that lay us low, and there is no amount of care that can prevent oak from eventually becoming riddled and weakened from the effects of tiny worms. Deep was the distress among the administrators and the trustees when it was revealed that the great beams had become unsound, and would have to be replaced. The flimsy fir of modern construction was wholly unsuitable; where, in the twentieth century, were such oak beams to be had? One day, the dean of the college had a quirky thought. One of their employees held the position of forester, managing one part of the institution's endowments, a college woods. Perhaps this man might know of some possible sources for the replacement beams. Summoned into the presence of the dean, the old fellow was unpolished but certain of his ground. "We hev been a-growing them oak trees two hundred years," he said. "Been wondering ef you might be wanting 'em soon-like."

Well, friends, my vote is cast. Though we try to avoid it, every so often it happens that the annual minister's study group of which I am a member can only reserve our retreat center on the first week of November in an election year. So I hied me to the election commission's web site, and sent off for an absentee ballot, which is now in the mail on the way back to them, sealed and signed. As I was filling in all the little ovals, it occurred to me that although the 200th anniversary of this nation's founding is well behind us, and I hope to live to celebrate our 250th, we have not yet reached the first centennial of my right, as a woman, to cast that vote. A thought to which we shall return presently.

What lies before us in our own time is no paradisal dream, either of the future or of the past; it is, rather, a vast network of opportunities whose hardship is their possibility. If the kings and the presidents and the prime ministers can come together in mutual humility and peace, to take counsel of one another concerning the common good of the world, then there is hope for many things that are yet possible for us to achieve. It is true; some of the nations whose leaders stand somewhere in that posed crowd together are at war. Some of those nations sell nuclear arms, shelter terrorists, practice atrocities, pollute the air and water, deceive their citizens, abuse their powers-nor does our own nation stand innocent among them. But that truth does not make this photograph, and what it represents, less precious. It does not make the fifty-five year old enterprise of the United Nations, with its fragile, persistent, overwhelming work of chipping away at the sources of human misery, less necessary. It only means that the hard part of our most important common yearnings is precisely that they are possible-that with struggle, and patience, and research, and money, and with sheer stubborn, persistent effort, we can make them come to pass.

It is almost impossible not to feel loathing for anything which calls into question the accuracy of some of the most potent images we use to structure our values and desires. It is human nature, and we can't help the feelings, any more than we can help feeling cold when the temperature falls, or help feeling grief when we loose something we care about. Any more than we can help, when we are children, assuming that the universe revolves around us and our needs. It is a function of maturity to come to the point where we can endure to hear our deepest values, that which we depend upon to give meaning to our lives, challenged. The first impulse is always to destroy that challenge, whatever it is, because it feels like something that is threatening to destroy us and the whole fabric of our universe. The first impulse is always to obliterate the otherness, to silence the voice that questions, to make the discomfort that it causes go away. Danny Overstreet is dead as a result of Ronald Gay's attempt to silence the threatening questions. 22 others whose names we know - and how many whose names we shall never know? - are dead from the same violent, fearful effort to destroy the different, to silence the challenge.

Those of you who have been participating in the current adult education program dealing with the Hebrew Scriptures have several times heard me compare the construction of the Bible to the layers of an onion, and this is true of the Christian portion also. It is impossible to make an intelligent argument about specific things that Jesus is said to have taught and done, without reference to which scripture writer or writers is making that claim, and what their agenda would have been in relating the particular incident or saying. And the bottom line is that without the gospel accounts of his life and teachings, we know just about nothing of Jesus. Even the handful of fragmentary non-scriptural contemporary references to him are partisan and suspect, and in any case they barely suggest that someone named Jesus existed, had friends, and died; they tell us nothing at all about his beliefs, his teachings, or his ministry.

How strange that I should speak this morning on how the gods were made, when we have all been definitely taught that the gods were never made. Everything else indeed has been made, but not the gods; they are the creators, not the created; they are the beings that made all things else. But I can assure you that the gods, like everything else, were made, if not by the process of manufacture, at least by the process of growth. We have long been taught that man was made by God in his own image; but now we know that the reversal of this thought is the truth: namely, that God was made by man in his image. The origin of God lies far back in the dim past, but it does not antedate the advent of man. So far as we can know, God is merely a mental concept, and apart from human beings, there appears to be no such concept.

There is a basic core of capacity for violence that is part of the makeup of human beings. And while we would like to think that with our superior intellects and our commitment to rationality and our new-age sensitivity, we have gotten that capability under control, I am not completely convinced. Indeed, it seems to me that this capability can be fairly predictably evoked, in most people, by the right combination of circumstances. And that fact, that our capacity for violence can be evoked, even in some sense against our will and against our best judgement, is one of the ways in which the idea of original sin becomes understandable for me.

Sometimes we're just trying to make it through the day, or to the end of the week, doing whatever it is we have to do to keep on keeping on, wishing the hours would pass. Sometimes the pieces fall into place, and we are doing well from day to day - the bills get paid, the plumbing works, we have satisfying relationships and work that is endurable. We build a certain security and a certain identity in the world. But sometimes, maybe just for a moment, we get a glimpse of the cathedral that our lives are meant to be. Sometimes we know with utter certainty that we are the servants of a vision larger than our own pride or pleasures, and then there is neither drudgery nor achievement, but the joy of being consumed by something ultimate - some great justice, or truth, or beauty, that calls forth more than we knew was in us to give.