"God"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
January 6, 2008

READINGS

1. Philip Appleman's poem, “O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie”
2. Karen Armstrong, from the introduction to her book “A History of God”
3. David Whyte’s poem, “Self Portrait”

SERMON

Each time I sit down to write a sermon, I ask myself, “Why am I giving a sermon about that particular topic?”

Sometimes, let me confess, I ask this question in the spirit of desperation, as in “What was I thinking when I chose that awful topic!” But usually it is more thoughtful – an honest wondering about my intentions and directions.

So why did I decide to give a sermon about God?

Well, first of all, we can’t ignore it that God shows up in all of our lives, whether we like it or not. Look at the current political realm – God is there (perhaps more than some of us like!). God is in literature, music, art, theatre, history … God is a topic – spoken or unspoken – with our families, in our workplaces, our schools, and our neighborhoods.

I also decided to tackle this topic because our religious community needs to be a place where big questions can be spoken aloud. A place where we search for and create meaning for ourselves – individually, and collectively.

And “God,” whether we like the word or not, is one metaphor for ultimate meaning, ultimate concern, ultimate reality.

It’s also because I know that Unitarian Universalists believe a great variety of things when it comes to God or not-God. Because our religion is creedless, we are free as individuals to believe whatever seems to us to be most true and meaningful.

For some of us, that means believing in God in our own individual way. Perhaps we view "God" as a creative process, as life force, as the organizing principle of the universe, as the ideal of love and justice, or of goodness and perfection. We might think of God as the ground of our being, or that spark “present in all, yet greater than each.” For some of us, God is embodied in the person of Jesus; as teacher, exemplar, and mediator of truth. For some of us God is Love, writ large. Or perhaps we use the word "God" as a symbol for the deepest and dearest values of life.

Some of us don’t know if we believe in God or not, or perhaps we know that we believe in something, but are loath to use the word God to name it, because the word has that old image attached to it of the white-haired guy in the sky who created everything and is controlling everything. The name “God” sounds to us too much like the god of Philip Appleman’s prayer – the one who can give us great abs and a steel-trap mind, as well as wisdom, will and wit if we have the audacity to demand it.

Some of us believe that the word God can only be used to mean a supernatural power. Some of us believe in more than one god, or the Goddess. Some of us refer to God as “Spirit.” (As in, when I listen to “Spirit,” I know I will do the right thing… or I am seeking to connect with “Spirit.”) I like what the Rev. Forrest Church said; that “God is not God's name. God is our name for the highest power we can imagine. For some the highest imaginable power will be a petty and angry tribal baron ensconced high above the clouds on a golden throne, visiting punishment on all who don't believe in him. But for others, the highest power is love, goodness, justice, or the spirit of life itself. Each of us projects our limited experience on a cosmic screen in letters as big as our minds can fashion.”

What we end up believing about god is usually the result of a lifelong process – we take what we were taught in childhood and apply to it our adult rational thinking, reflection, and study. But even more so, we pass our beliefs through the fire of our personal experiences – both joyful and anguished. And we find that as they change with our changing lives, our beliefs are rarely a matter of simple personal choice, as though we took our seats at the God café and decided which dishes on the menu of ideologies, theologies and creeds looked the most appetizing. Instead, we believe – whether we articulate it or not -- what we must. We believe what our lives show us to be true.

For some of us, that truth is the absurdity of god. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett – an evolutionary biologist, a neuroscientist, and a philosopher, have all written books in the past year or two that essentially name religion and religious behavior as useless and misguided. “The God Delusion,” Dawkins’ book, is the one I ventured into. In it, he systematically and very rationally takes apart various religions’ ideas about God. It was beautiful, in a way, and certainly interesting. Much of it I agreed with, in a rational sort of way. But it also struck me as terribly arrogant – seemingly based on the assumption that people who believe in God in any way simply haven’t studied their history or “thought things through” well enough (or else how could they possibly believe?).

Where does belief come from? There was a great article on this question published last March in the New York Times. Entitled “Darwin’s God,” (by Robin Marantz Henig – March 4, 2007) the article focused on anthropologists and evolutionary biologists who are studying religious behavior from a Darwinian perspective, seeking to explain how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. The various scholars tend to agree that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved in early humans, but they disagree on why it evolved. Some posit that belief itself was adaptive, while others support the theory that the tendency to believe in a God of some kind was just an evolutionary byproduct, a consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Robin Marantz Henig, the article’s author, asks some great and urgent questions: “Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?”

This may sound like heresy, but as long as our nation maintains its stand on freedom of religion, I’m not sure it matters which theory eventually proves correct, or at least dominant in our time. Just because science provides evidence for the non-existence of God doesn’t mean that people will or should stop believing. It’s like what Justin Barrett, one of the scientists exploring the idea that belief is a byproduct of evolution, wrote, “Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me -- should I then stop believing that she does?” (from NYT article) Belief’s emotional component ensures its endurance.

Rather than trying to prove or disprove the existence of God, I think it is more important for us as human beings to determine what it is that we hold of ultimate meaning and importance. For that, in essence, is our God – what we hold of ultimate concern will shape our morals and our behavior, and determine how we live our lives.

My colleague Roger Bertschausen told a story in a sermon a couple of years ago that gives us an excellent image of how this works. Before he was called to serve the Fox Valley UU Fellowship up in Appleton, Roger worked for a year as a chaplain in a drug and alcohol treatment center. There he taught a monthly class about spirituality, and to show the class what he believed spirituality was, he decided to draw a big wheel on a chalkboard at the front of the room. “Each spoke of the wheel represents an aspect of your life,” he’d explain to the class. “Mind, body, emotions, senses, relationships, and vocation, for example.” At the middle of the wheel was its hub, of course. Roger told his class that what was in the hub was that which was most important to them: their ultimate concern.

Now, as individual human beings, we have a lot of different things in that hub. Our lives “revolve around” different ideals. For some of us, security might be in our hub, or money, or family, or our work. Your hub might contain community, or a particular idea or way of believing in God. For the drug addicts, Roger wrote, “It’s their drug of choice that occupies the premier spot in the wheel of their life.”

Clearly, whatever we have in the hub of our wheel has a huge impact on our spokes – on those different aspects of our lives. Roger says that he would ask the people in his spirituality class how having a drug in their hub affected the spokes of their wheels. “What happened to your mind?” he would ask. “What happened to your body? Your relationships?” As they responded to his questions -- detailing the damage in their lives -- Roger would turn to the chalkboard and erase significant parts of the spokes – showing in a clear and dramatic way just how addiction was wrecking them. For a wheel with broken spokes cannot roll smoothly down the path of life – it inevitably wobbles, and often crashes! It became very clear that for recovery to happen, the addicts needed to repair their spokes – but even more important, they needed to find a something else – something healthy and affirming, to place in the hub of their lives. (“What is Your Ultimate Concern?” A sermon by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen, Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, May 7-8, 2005 www.fvuuf.org)

This is a metaphor that can work for any one of us. What does your life revolve around? Finding out for ourselves what is at the center of life is one of the most important tasks of the human spiritual journey. And often, even the most brilliant among us do not consciously know what is there.

The Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry, our Unitarian Universalist theological school in California, told a story of finding, painfully, what was at the center of her life. In the book, “Proverbs of Ashes,” which she wrote with her friend and colleague the Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock, Dr. Parker speaks of the terrible conditions of her early childhood, a time when she was sexually abused repeatedly by “Frank,” an older man who lived next door to her family. Like many survivors of such assaults, Dr. Parker repressed the memories of them for years, releasing them in the safe sanctuary of a trusted therapist only after she was an adult, only after she had established a successful career as a theologian and minister known for her deeply moving preaching and writing that the old, patriarchal, punitive god who demanded absolute obedience and suffering in exchange for beneficence – was dead. She had deconstructed that god, and preached, instead, a god of love and mercy and freedom.

But when the memories of Frank surfaced, Dr. Parker found herself in a crisis of faith. She wrote, “I had to face that at the core of my being I did not believe that such mercy or freedom existed. I only really believed in Frank.” (pp. 194-6, “Proverbs of Ashes.”)

Frank was filling her hub – imagine the pain of such a discovery. It’s enough to help us know why many of us do not want to examine what might be at our center. And yet, the pain of living from outgrown or ingrown beliefs also is terrible. It stops our unfolding as human beings.

One night, in anguish, Dr. Parker shared what was happening in her inner life with a friend. When he offered to pray with her, she told him that she had tried prayer, but that God didn’t help. He replied, “Well then, this is California (after all)... Get another god!” Parker laughed, but also realized that her friend had a serious point. She wrote, “His suggestion reminded me that I had the power to choose the God I would worship.” (From "Proverbs of Ashes, p. 195)

Now, I did say earlier that I don’t believe we actually choose our beliefs, and I don’t think Rebecca Parker believes that, either. But it is true that when our beliefs are frozen in place, attached to memories or images that are no longer living or useful in our lives, we can choose the hard work of moving on. We can choose to remember and honor all of our experiences, not only those which hurt us most or stopped us in our tracks. We can choose to fully inhabit all of our experiences by passing our ultimate concerns, our God-ideas or images through them as though they were a lens, a fire. And perhaps then those images will emerge transformed – as something worthy of holding in our center, our hub.

You might be wondering, at this point, what I believe regarding God. Many of you know my story – that I was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, in particular, as a humanist Unitarian Universalist, which was the dominant theology of our religious movement during the 60s and 70s.

My parents probably did not intend this, but the distinct impression I had in childhood was that I was forbidden to believe in a god of any kind. God-belief was superstition, not scientifically provable, and therefore unworthy of the allegiance of intelligent folk. I was introduced to a dazzling array of god-images and beliefs in UU Sunday School classes – like the ones in Sandy Eisenberg Sasso’s story, but told they belonged to other people, not to us. But I was taught reverence for Mother Earth.

Psychologists say that children up to about the age of 4 naturally believe in omniscience. They think that everyone knows what they know, that everyone knows what they are thinking – especially their mothers and fathers. The scientists studying the evolution of religious belief say that this hard-wiring, this predilection for belief in an all-knowing presence is then reinforced by the culture the child grows up in, which begins to provide the specifics of what to believe – or, in my case, what NOT to believe – before the child grows out of this early phase.

This has helped me explain to myself why I have never been able to believe in God in any conventional way. I have, though, through study and through life experience and encounters with a Divine I cannot name or explain, come to believe that there is something of that divine in each person, in each living thing, and that the Holy is a wholeness made up of the sum of all those “somethings,” but also is larger than that sum. This theological stance is sometimes known as panentheism. God has never had a face for me, has never been a concrete image for me, no matter how hard I’ve tried. But through the experiences of grief and loss, of the deaths of people I love, and experiences of absolute oneness I have known in nature, I have moved over the course of my lifetime away from the place where God could never exist.

What I try to hold in my center, in my hub, and live from, is that sense of interdependence, of inherent relatedness between and among all people and all beings, that rises up from my panentheistic beliefs. My vocation as a parish minister is probably the most telling spoke in the life-wheel that centers around this hub, for I believe that it is through community, through connection with one another, that we become who we are meant to be, and change the world for the greater good of all.

What is at your center? What is of ultimate concern, ultimate meaning for you? What does your life revolve around – when you look at how you are living, what god-image does it reveal? Are you carrying an idea of god that was formed when you were a young child, or have you allowed your religious imagination to roam freely, to shape an image more mature and liberating? Or perhaps, with David Whyte, the author of our third reading, you can say that you are not interested in beliefs, but only in the evidence human lives show of living them.

God. It’s a big topic, a big question, with many answers – including yours – and I look forward to hearing them as we continue this morning.

Amen.