s91-13 "Prayer Before Sermon

"God Talk"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

1/29/06

When they told us in Sunday School that God is everywhere, they could have been talking about the recent news cycle. . . . In a culture defined by the separation of church and state, President Bush and his allies have mastered the use of religious affirmation as a deflection not only of criticism, but of critical thought. God is thus a trump card, a free pass. If the president, senators, and members of Congress can justify their decisions by appeals to God, why not judges?

''Acts of God" is the phrase applied to staggering natural disasters, from Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake to the coming avian flu. At the same time, survivors of such catastrophes credit God for having saved them, as if God callously let all those others die. Humans are perplexed when wanton suffering occurs, especially among children, and assumptions about God are overturned. The question becomes, How could God let this happen? Today, in Pakistan, where fatal disease, hunger, and thirst go unabated, the very ones who praised God last week for sparing them are pleading with God now, to no avail.

In the argument between creationists and scientists, those aiming to defend God make absolute claims about mysteries of the deep past as if they themselves were there. Air Force flyers have thought of God as their copilot in the past, but in today's Air Force, God sits atop the chain-of-command. At the US Air Force Academy, which was rocked by sex scandals not long ago, God is now the designated dean of discipline, but this jeopardizes infidel careers. Unit cohesion requires conversion. Indeed, displays of faith can be a prerequisite for promotion throughout a government where the White House itself is a House of God. In Iraq, meanwhile, someone will turn his body into a bomb today, killing others by blowing himself up while saying, ''God is great!"

Who is this ''God" in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one's faith in such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most striking about so much talk of ''God," both to affirm and to deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things.

But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then? The glib God-talk that infuses public discourse in contemporary America descends from an anthropomorphic habit of mind, dating to the Bible and beyond, that treats God like an intimate friend or well-known enemy, depending on the weather and the outcome of battles. But there is another strain in the Biblical tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness so complete that even the use of the word ''God" as a name for this Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism -- all the same.

But here is where it gets tricky. What if God's unknowability is the most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based, would open into true modesty. The closed creation, in which every question has an answer, would be replaced by an infinite cosmos where every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ''God" is the living pulse of such open-ended ness, then God is of no use in systems of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere. And that, too, shows in America, especially in its fake religiosity.

There was a little old lady, who every morning. stepped onto her front porch, raised her arms to the sky, and shouted: "PRAISE THE LORD!"

One day an atheist moved into the house next door. He became irritated at the little old lady. Every morning he'd step onto his front porch after her and yell: "THERE IS NO LORD!"

Time passed with the two of them carrying on this way every day. One morning, in the middle of winter, the little old lady stepped onto her front porch and shouted: "PRAISE THE LORD! Please Lord, I have no food and I am starving, provide for me, oh Lord!

The next morning she stepped onto her porch and there were two huge bags of groceries sitting there. "PRAISE THE LORD!" she cried out. "HE HAS PROVIDED GROCERIES FOR ME!"

The atheist neighbor jumped out of the hedges and shouted: "THERE IS NO LORD. I BOUGHT THOSE GROCERIES!!"

The little old lady threw her arms into the air and shouted: "PRAISE THE LORD! HE HAS PROVIDED ME WITH GROCERIES AND MADE THE DEVIL PAY FOR THEM!

During my “Question and Answer Sermon” on January 1^st, I received two questions that I declined to answer extemporaneously because I was concerned that I would not do them justice in that context. They were:

“What does God – the word or the concept – mean to you?” and “I do not believe in [a] ‘God” that is a white man, but would like to pray to a higher being for spiritual support and faith. Who can I pray to?”

This church has no theological creed. That means that there is some theological diversity in our membership because we do not require people to agree with any particular perspective on “god” in order to be members of this congregation. We therefore have members to whom these questions are significant, as well as many to whom they may not be a matter of great concern.

It is clear that a hundred and fifty years ago, the vast majority of Unitarians and Universalists would have considered these questions important indeed. In the intervening century and a half, the importance of “god questions” has waxed and waned. There was a major controversy in the 1930's between those Unitarians and Universalists who continued to believe there was a god at the center of our religion, and those for whom human and natural rather than supernatural issues were the heart. For a time, it appeared that the humanists had come out on top.

When I came into the ministry in 1965, a major study of our association showed that outside of New England, humanists predominated, while in the traditional New England churches, theism remained strong. About 20 years ago, a study of this congregation showed 11 respondents defining themselves as Christians, 37 as theists, 113 as humanists, 27 as agnostics, 9 as atheists, and 9 as “other,” which would imply that a god was important to one out of four at that time.

I have seen no recent statistics for the Association, but there is evidence of a significant increase in “God Talk” in our churches in recent years.

At the beginning of January, three years ago, Bill Sinkford, the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association delivered a sermon in Fort Worth Texas which made the wire services. A reporter, who was present, reported:

A former atheist who is now president of the Unitarian Universalist Association will push to put the word ‘God’ into a new statement of principles of the Boston-based, liberal church group, he said Sunday. . . .[The reporter quoted] ‘These are troubled times, and we need to reclaim our goals and values,’ Sinkford said in a message at First Jefferson. ‘We need to be able to say Unitarian Universalists believe there is one God, and that God is a loving God who would condemn no one out of hand.”

Now, Bill backed down in a hurry and claimed his words had been taken out of context, but the more he said, the clearer it seemed that his perspective had been fairly stated. In the manuscript Bill posted on the internet after the fact, Bill said he was not “suggesting a return to traditional Christian language” but that he did:

“feel that we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, to talk about human agency in theological terms - the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we feel to be of ultimate importance.”

He was also clear that for him, the word “God” does that. He tells the story of a serious illness that threatened the life of one of his children and how it was calling on God, not on our Principles and Purposes, that got him through the crisis.

Bill also believes, as do others, that the size of our membership is limited by the fact that we are not appealing to liberal theists because “god” is not mentioned often enough in some of our churches to make some visitors feel like they’ve been in church. Some of you have told me about visitors who have not returned because I don’t talk about God.

In fact, a high percentage of our younger ministers, I would even say most, use quite a bit of “God Talk” and some are openly dismissive of humanist dinosaurs like me to whom they refer as “god-phobic.”

[This is not said to panic those who are worried about my successor. There are still humanist ministers out there, if that is what you seek, but a survey of this congregation will be a part of the preparation for the search for a new minister and I would not presume at this point to judge the outcome of that survey. You will decide by the survey and your choice of search committee members.]

I want to be clear about what I mean by “God Talk.” I am not suggesting that there are many UU ministers who believe in the old paternalistic image of a divine being sitting on a throne somewhere, controlling the world. The truth is that it is probably the minority of seminary educated mainline ministers (by which I mean Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, and Lutheran ministers) who believe in the traditional kind of God, although few of them may admit it to their

Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong draws a lot of fire for saying out loud and in print what many Christian ministers dare not say. He has asserted:

Theism is the historic way men and women have been taught to think about God. Most people think theism is the only conceivable way to think about God. The primary image of God in the Bible is a theistic image.

By that I mean that God is conceived of as a Being, even the Supreme Being, external to this world, supernatural in power, and operating on this world in some fashion to call this world and those of us who inhabit it into the divine will or the divine presence. This theistic Being is inevitably portrayed in human terms as a person who has a will, who loves, who rewards and who punishes. One can find other images of God in the scriptures, but this is the predominant and the familiar one. . . .

[Given the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and modern science, Spong asserts ] this God no longer explains mysteries, cures sicknesses, directs the weather, fights wars, punishes sinners, rewards faithfulness. Indeed, the idea of an external supernatural Deity who invades human affairs periodically to impose the divine will upon this world, though still given lip service in worship settings, has nonetheless died culturally.

[Spong reports] At least one English theologian, Michael Goulder, saw this shrinking conclusion of the theistic God destroying his faith. He became an atheist when he came to the perception that the God of traditional theism "no longer has any work to do." If God is to be identified exclusively with this theistic understanding of God, then it is fair to say that culturally at least God has ceased to live in our world.

. . . Sigmund Freud analyzed the symbols of Christianity and found in them manifestations of a deep seated infantile neurosis. The God understood as a father figure who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity. This view of God issued rather into either a religious mentality of passive dependency or an aggressive secular rejection of all things religious.

I am convinced that there is a realm of spirit, transcendence and otherness beyond the limits of my physical existence. I use the word God to speak of this realm. I experience the inbreaking of this realm in those moments when life is expanded, when consciousness is enhanced and when eyes are opened to view dimensions of life beyond our normal boundaries. I do not expect a supernatural being from this realm to invade my world to accomplish some miraculous purpose. I do expect human life to make this realm known in the quality of our lives, in the wastefulness of our love and in the expansion of our being. I do believe that in this mysterious realm of the divine, our love and our caring can loose energy that embraces us, makes us whole, brings healing power, and invites us to share in that which is timeless. I further believe that those of us who know this reality are responsible for acting it out so that it impacts our world and transforms it, calling us into a new awareness of the holy.

Now, this is not what Pat Robertson or the ministers at First Free or Heartland or First Assembly are talking about when they say God, nor is it likely to be heard clearly at Second Con or from other Rockford pulpits. This is obviously what the former Paulist Roman Catholic Priest James Carroll was talking about when he referred to the replacement of:

The closed creation, in which every question has an answer . . . by an infinite cosmos where every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ''God" is the living pulse of such open-endedness, then God is of no use in systems of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere. . .

It is this kind of God of whom most Unitarian Universalists “God Talkers” are speaking – a “process god,” a natural rather than a supernatural god, a god for thinkers.

Dean Tollefsrud called my attention to a recent book, The End of Faith which is subtitled “Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” by Sam Harris. It came out last year in Hardcover and recently in paper. [WW Norton, New York, 2005] It received the 2005 PEN Award for non-fiction. The End of Faith is a fascinating book which has been criticized by both conservatives and liberals.

Harris asserts that “theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.” I have frequently over the years raised the open question whether religion has done more harm than good. Harris has no doubt: he believes the good would have happened anyhow because of human nature and the terror and violence religion has engendered has been enormous. He contends that:

some of our most cherished beliefs about the world . . . are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another, A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas that divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars, but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.(p. 12)

We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or of any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia – because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity, Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world. (P. 14)

Harris points to some of the barbaric instructions promulgated by the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, the barbarism of much of Christian history, and lands heavily on Islam in a way that has offended many liberals.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about the people who really believe in the God of their fathers because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world – to say for instance that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish – is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness, We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. (pp. 22-3)

Harris lists the places where there have been recent religious conflicts and confronts us with the reality that:

Religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years. These events should strike us like psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are. Give people Divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire.

. . . all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere – if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know – then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy. Think of all the good things human beings will not do in this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men. How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God?

Does it really matter that some people believe in a God? In one of many examples, Harris cites Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who, in speaking at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago said:

This is not the Old Testament I emphasize but St. Paul . . . [T]he core of his message is that government . . . derives its moral authority from God. . . . Indeed it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. . . . I attribute this to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? [pp 126-7]

Harris comments, “It is remarkable that we are the last civilized nation to put “evildoers” to death, and Justice Scalia rightly attributes this to our style of religiosity.” Harris links our punishment of “victimless crimes” directly to Christian ideas of sin.

Harris’ book is full of straight talk about difficult subjects. I am uneasy about his intense criticism of Islam, although he makes a good case. I am troubled by his opposition to pacifism and his justification of torture, but he makes good arguments.

It is interesting that Harris alienated many humanists by his chapter on “Experiments in Consciousness.” Perhaps surprisingly, Harris is very clear about the value of mysticism and spirituality, although he does not like the words. It is his contention that we are blind to much of the splendor of life and that those who explore mysticism, without a god, those who make themselves fully conscious, end up becoming more aware of the oneness of life. He insists:

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith. [p. 221]

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call “spiritual.” No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we recognize this. [p. 227]

In response to the questions about God, I have spoken of the view of progressive Christians like Bishop Spong who use the word, but in very non-traditional ways, and I have shared with you my enthusiasm for Sam Harris’ critique of the danger he believes is inherent in the continued use of the concept of a God.

I have thus far not responded to the questions of where to turn for spiritual support and what “god” means to me, but I have been laying the foundation. I will not, and cannot, speak for all Unitarian Universalists. While I like much of what Harris says, I do not have the same degree of confidence that my view is the right one, although I think it is. There are many people I respect who use “God Talk,” and while I appreciate what Harris says about the dangers of our not objecting, I am more humble than he. My freedom to disbelieve is linked to others’ freedom to believe. It is also easier to be an iconoclast when you don’t have to live with the people whose idols you have shattered.

Most, if not all of us, when we are in the midst of trying times, experience, at least transiently, the wish we could return to having what we thought our parents were – loving, all knowing, all powerful beings who will protect us from harm. We learned they were, in fact, human and limited, and so some turn to the language of the superstitious past, to the myths of pre-scientific times and posit a super-natural parent out there whose “eye is on the sparrow.” We want to believe that everything that happens has a reason. “There must be a plan.” Non-being is such a threat to some that they hope for a life after this. Some tolerate the loss of loved ones better because of the hope of an ultimate reunion.

Wishing doesn’t make it true. Many people have believed it, so it could be, but I, personally, have no such belief. I do believe that we have strengths that we barely perceive. I believe that to the degree that we learn to view ourselves as part of the universe rather than separate from it, when we view our trials and tribulations as part of the human experience, that knowing that there are those who love us and will do what they can to support us, that knowing that there are forces of nature which are beyond human control and that it is not that we are being punished for our failings – all this helps me in those difficult times.

I never cease to be shocked by what I consider the blasphemy of those who survive a tragedy and ascribe their survival to “the hand of God,” as if, somehow, they were more deserving, more pure, more loved than those who did not survive. What kind of God worthy of the name would play favorites that way?

To whom would I/ do I pray for support? I pray to my better, stronger self; to those who love me; and to those others in the human community who may have more wisdom or experience than I in dealing with the challenge I am facing. [There were times in the past two weeks when I wanted my Mommy to make the pain go away, but I relied instead on the doctors.]

What does the concept of God mean to me. As those who have attended our Fireside sessions, or who have heard sermons in the past know, if I were to choose a theology, it would be that of the Empirical Theist, Edward Scribner Ames, who believed that the word “God” was a symbol used to speak of the highest of which people could imagine. “God” changed over the years as people became more civilized, and that is clear in reading the Hebrew Scriptures.

“God” is, however, a word I do not find useful for many of the reasons that Harris spells out. If I were to use it I would feel dishonest in my communication because I believe that the function of words is to communicate. It is clear what the word “God” communicates to most people in this culture. The theistic beliefs of a supernatural parent that the word calls to mind in most of those who hear it are concepts that I believe have been destructive rather than constructive. It is a word which most often builds rather than taking down walls between people. It is a word which most often leads to feelings of superiority rather than commonality. It is a word which generally shuts down rather than encouraging dialogue, because those who do believe have so little proof that their final appeal is to “faith” which is not debatable.

Just as I am not willing to subscribe to a creed which demands that I believe in a god, so too am I unwilling to establish a creed which shuts out those who do have a concept of god which they experience as making them more whole. If they are seeking a minister who will help buttress their faith, I am not the one: I cannot advocate something in which I do not believe. If they are seeking a minister who will be attentive to their joys and sorrows, who will offer what support he can, a person who will engage with them in dialogue about the challenges they face, I try to be that one.

It is my understanding of our history, and of my experience as a Unitarian Universalist that there is so much we share in the human endeavor we call life, there is so much work to be done to achieve what the ancients called “the Kingdom of God,” that I do not believe that it is a good use of our energy to worry about the differences in how we see the world. [That, of course, cuts both ways. Were the congregation to choose to call a minister who uses God Talk in the way that Spong or Carroll use it, I would hope that those who don’t prefer it would not let it be an obstacle to hearing what is being said without wasting a lot of energy worrying about the differences in how we see the world and focus instead on the work that needs doing.]

This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call “spiritual.” No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.

If the hungry little old lady next door wishes to attribute the bags of groceries I buy her to the hand of God, to me, that is far less important than my recognition of and action on behalf of our interdependence.