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October 2, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 2, 2005

What it Means to be UU

One of the most common questions I am asked is in its essence: “What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist?” That is both an easy, and at the same time, a difficult question to answer. Not that we have a monopoly on this problem of how to define our faith, for I believe this is the same issue for people of all religions, of all faiths, once you get past what may be the sound bite, or elevator speech, of the religion. After a Christian says that to be a Christian means to believe in Jesus as the only son of God, there is still a lot left to say about what it means to be a Christian; if this were not the case, then we would not see hundreds of different Christian denominations.

There are approximately one thousand different Christian denominations/sects, so clearly people find plenty about which to disagree, which means there is a great deal of complexity within Christianity.

The same complexity is true for all religions, including ours. So we are not alone in finding our faith complex; though we are often alone in admitting it. So, while I am here this morning to tell you what it means to be a UU, you must be aware that there is always more to be said.

The short answer that I have been giving for about ten years is that Unitarian Universalism is an ethics-based religion, which upholds the freedom and authority of the individual human mind and heart. We UUs generally agree that what we do with our beliefs is more important than what we variously say we believe. That we all do not have to believe alike to care alike.

The Rev. Alice Blair Wesley wrote:

      In continuity with our sixteenth-century Unitarian forebears, today we Unitarian Universalists are determined to follow our own reasoned convictions, no matter what others may say, and we embrace tolerance as a central principle, inside and outside our own churches.

Our UU faith, like all religions, is not just one thing, but a multiplicity. While we have many things in common, there are differences. This comes in large part because of our congregational polity; that is, each of our congregations is an independent body of members. Each congregation devises its own bylaws, votes in a Board of Trustees and President. But not all congregations use exactly the same language. The old church in Concord, MA, for example, calls their board the Standing Committee (which results in the predictable jokes each year prior to the Annual Meeting). But the governance is basically the same in all congregational polity-even those many that are not UU. Each congregation also choses whether to call a minister. At one time, the term fellowship, designated a congregation that was led by the laity, meaning member led. Though, nowadays, many of the former fellowships have since called ministers, so the old designation no longer has the same reliable meaning.

We are a bottom up organization, even to the UUA, for unlike many religions, we do not have a hierarchy with commands that come down to the congregations and the people from “on high”; instead, our varied thousand or so UU congregations in this country choose to affiliate in order to provide services and materials such as those for religious education: curricula, training for religious education coordinators, and the like. Also, the UUA is there to help in credentialing and settling ministers. The UUA is a macrocosm of the individual congregation, just like we vote here at Mill Creek at the annual meeting for whatever has been presented, like the annual budget, or whether to build this building, various proposals come out of the larger UU movement, presented and reviewed over a three year period(since it is harder to deal with such a large body), then voted on at our annual General Assemblies. The Rev. William Sinkford, our current President is elected in a democratic process, and given the authority to speak for our movement.

But the UUA President may have no independent revelations that God has told him that we must all pay triple dues in the coming year to raise his income. We don’t work that way.

Organizationally, then, UUs operate under the democratic principle, and try to give plenty of opportunity for each person to have a voice, but ultimately each community reflects the group. We here in Mill Creek congregation look much like other UU congregations, but no two are exactly the same. You might liken in to homemade bread, the ingredients can be the same, but each loaf has its own characteristics.

Every two or three generations an idea comes along and gains currency with enough people to make a big difference. This is true for us UUs, and other religious groups, too. Sometimes those ideas are forward thinking (they are always thought to be!), sometimes they are a return to some perceived better time, a return to orthodoxy, or a more ruled or regulated way of being as a group. Historically, we see that both things happen in times of stress.

Out of the Great Depression came the Humanist Manifesto, and that led to our fellowship movement, as one case in point. A similar situation occurred within Judaism following the Holocaust.

Those, of course, were very major stresses on the people, but even today we feel currents of distress within our country. People are fearful of the larger societal changes that are coming from our new global economics, and our new levels of communication. It is harder to keep the old ways in place under such stresses, and all people feel these stresses.

I chose the reading from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, precisely because Lewis really was commenting, both in his equally famous book, Main Street, as well as in Babbitt, on an American culture in flux. The first two decades of the 20th Century were times of great change with the Industrial Revolution in full spate, World War I-called the war to end all wars because it was so horrible and modern, and people clamoring for more freedoms as they were experiencing more freedom. In other words, it was a time like our own.

Nothing strikes Lewis so much as the tendency of people to talk about “family values” even while helping to bring a decline in them, or not living the values while preaching them to everyone else. This kind of hypocrisy was what his books decried, even while he is sympathetic with the struggles that such people have. He presents George Babbitt, the main character, as a man filled with contradictions, even though he professes strict adherence to one political party, one church, one mode of living. In the first half of the 20th Century, to call someone a Babbitt or talk about Babbittry was to point to this kind of middle-brow, anti-intellectual, anti-choice kind of thinking. It was a rather selfish, self-centered world, where if it’s good for me, then it’s good enough for everybody else.

Right now, there is some frustration among some UUs that we are not a large movement, that we do not have churches of ten-thousand members, and they believe we can use the techniques of the Christian evangelical mega-churches to increase and enlarge our UU faith. While, no one would like to see our congregations grow and expand more than I would, I personally do not believe we will have churches of that kind in the foreseeable future. The main reason is unlike many such evangelical movements, we UUs do not have salvation for sale.

What we have to offer is what might euphemistically be called a “DYI religion”; for what it means to be a UU is that you are expected to think for yourself, to examine your own values and beliefs, and to see where there is a disconnect if any between what you believe and how you behave. We do not have salvation for sale, we happily give it away. You can save yourself; in fact, we believe that only you can save yourself. We can help each other over the troubling questions of life, but like most things, we have to choose what we will do, and how we will live out our beliefs and values.

UU ministers do not promise you quick fixes, or instant faith, or a fast-track to heaven. We do not have any carrot of religious promise to hold out, nor a brickbat of religious punishment to hold over UUs. These are the marks of the old-fashioned and the modern mega churches. They offer feel-good religion, community that will support these brave new world viewpoints. While, here in our UU congregations by contrast, we are saying we do not know if there is any God who will give you a heavenly eternity; that we must have courage to live this life for this life alone, and be brave about the possibilities for another life. But, no UU minister can promise such things as never dying, or that God will keep you from harm, or anything else that Rev. Mondays or Elmer Gantrys of most evangelical movements promise without pause.

Part of what is at the heart of some of our modern UU thrust is the desire to bring a bit more standardization to our congregational practices. I personally worry about such a notion as standardizing, which I have heard here and there at our last General Assembly. I do not expect it to gain much currency, since that strikes too many of us as going down a road to doctrine. Which as Sinclair Lewis put it in the mouth of Dr. Yavitch, is standardization of thought. It is never a healthy thing for people to expect all of us to think alike, or try to, since there will always be a Unitarian in the crowd determined to make sure other points of view are considered.

Still, we do have a lot we can share, and sharing is a grand thing for us to do. I am all for sharing, and passing around the new music, new practices, for those who would like to sample them. There is a happy Golden Mean here that I feel we ought to strive for, but continue to be wary of breaking down of the gains in independence we have made in the last two-hundred plus years.

One thing that does characterize our UU faith is the social justice work that comes out of our ethical principles. We have said that we are called to be open and respectful of difference, and support people who have been marginalized by our society. This led us to be one of the leading supporters of the Civil Rights movement, long before most mainstream churches. We have always been characterized as doers, and virtually every member of this congregation is active in the larger community in some form of social, economic, or environmental justice. One of the principle goals that came out of last years revisioning process is that we want here at Mill Creek is to have more commitment to social concerns coming from, and identified with, our congregation.

UUs have always had a disproportionate influence in local, state, and federal branches of government, because we are people who act on our principles. So, to those who get in a twizzle about our small size, I would remind them as Margaret Mead said, that it has always been small groups who have made the great changes in the world. Then the rest follow along. In the late 1950s and early 60s, the majority of people in this country did not favor civil rights for all; few would be in that camp now.

To be a UU means we live with change, fight for change in some quarters, learn from change, work to understand change. We remember that Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of the 6th Century BCE, taught that the only thing that does not change is change itself. Certainly the 2600 years since he lived has been a testament to that truth.

We do not all have to believe alike to care alike. We do not all have to work in the same way to achieve good ends. This is the essence of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. We each have something to contribute to life, to our own lives, to our families and communities. For many of us, the best place we can work for a good life is within the supportive environment of our UU communities. Here we can learn, share, discuss, agree and disagree in safety, and in respect for the larger vision of freedom.

UUs have an important place in this free society among a lot of different religious groups, many of whom claim to be the only right religion. Our forebears recognized this truth, and we do not want to forsake it for the wrong ends. For, the one thing that significant to most of us UUs is the idea that there is danger from groups who believe they have all the answers, that they have all the truth, and who happily defame others who differ. When just such a situation was allowed to develop in the past it led to the period of history we now call the Dark Ages.

Light is necessary for freedom, and that is what I believe is our UU mission: to shine the light of questioning, exploration, investigation upon all the dark corners of life-starting with our own lives.

So be it

 

October 9, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 9, 2005

Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement

We are now in the period of the Jewish calendar of the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah which lasts ten days ending with Yom Kippur. Professor Judith Hauptman of the Jewish Theological Seminary states that these holidays had little mention in the Bible, and that it was not until around 200 CE that the rabbis of the Talmud (that great collection of commentary and argument on the scriptures) first began to call this the New Year and turned it into, as she says, much more that the Bible ever imagined it would become, a day of introspection, a day of reflection, a day of hoping to become better people in the coming year, and, in particular, a day in which we hope God will remember us.

What most significantly led to the rise of this holiday was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. From that point forward Judaism became a religion that was eventually to be dispersed throughout the world, instead of centered in the temple at Jerusalem as it had been up to that time. As happens with all religions over time, and certainly happened under stresses of the Diaspora, the religion changed; indeed, it had to change. If Jews were to survive, if their religion were to survive, the rabbis knew they had to make accommodations, as Judaism went from being temple-based to home-based. The strongly agricultural themes of the Jewish holidays of the temple had added to them more personal, religious, and spiritual themes.

Because some rabbis believed that it was a lack of faith that had led to the temple’s destruction and the Jews exile from Israel, they made the holiday more introspective so as to prompt those in the Jewish community to change their ways, to move them toward repentance. One of the most famous rabbis was Maimonides, a 12th Century scholar was one who suggested some of the ways the people might repent.

Part of my sermon today is to help us understand this important religion that gave birth to not only a nation but to the other two most powerful religions, Christianity and Islam. My purpose is equally to talk about forgiveness which we all must learn if we are to have peaceful and joyful lives.

Some of the strictures the rabbis put upon the people are hard, like those related to forgiveness. But then recognizing one’s wrongs to others always is hard for us to do, we would much rather rationalize them. Rabbi Irwin Kula says that first you have to realize you have done something wrong, which may be the most difficult thing to do. Again, we usually come up with good excuses for doing things we know are not right.

Rabbi Kula says that after you realize or admit that you have done something wrong, you are then expected to feel remorse; that is, you have to regret what you did. (You may have at some time noticed perhaps on a news report from Jerusalem, the orthodox or Hassidic Jews striking their chests on the left side, the heart side; this is to show anguish, regret, or remorse.)

From acknowledgement of wrong or sin, to remorse, then there needs to be reconciliation. If you have harmed someone, wronged someone, you must ask for forgiveness, and it is only then that there can be repentance.

Professor Hauptman points out that you can pray to God all you want, but if you have wronged anyone, God will not wipe that sin away until you go to the person or the people and ask their forgiveness. Few of us have that kind of courage under normal circumstances, which is what gave rise to much of the ritual that highlights these most holy of Jewish holidays. The rituals and practices help to move people toward forgiveness.

So from Rosh Hashanah through the ten days that lead to the most holy day, Yom Kippur, a set of customs arose. From Rabbi Kula in an interview he did for a PBS program:

      As Yom Kippur emerges in the years of rabbinic Judaism-600, 700 years that it takes to emerge-a set of customs evolved, customs of not eating, not washing, not making love, not anointing your body, not drinking, certain ways or forms that allow you to experience your death, confronting your death face to face, and of course, in the confrontation with death, there’s a further vitality and affirmation of life.

At Yom Kippur, as Judith Hauptman states: we [Jews] believe that we have been forgiven for all of our misdemeanors and we start again afresh.

The ram’s horn, the shofar, which is blown to signal the beginning of the holy days, is blown to close them, to put a cap, as it were, onto the old year signaling that the new year begins. The faithful have their names written in the Book of Life for the new year. So this is how the Jewish faithful begin the new year.

The end of the harvest has traditionally been the time of the New Year for most ancient religions. In the Jewish calendar this will be the year 5767, and we recognize it and honor it as an ancient religion, which over these nearly six thousand years has learned a great deal about people of faith, a religion which has learned a great deal about people in their weakest and their greatest moments.

As Unitarian Universalists, we too derive from this great religion in our Protestant heritage. We too recognize that one of the deepest and most painful aspects of our humanity is the need to be reminded that we wrong others as well as experience being wronged, and that we must learn to forgive, because forgiveness is necessary to communal life. Part of what leads to so much that is destructive in the world comes from doing wrong, but just as much comes from a general unwillingness to forgive those who have wronged us.

We must be able to leave the past behind us if we are to go forward to a better life, to better times. I read somewhere once this analogy: that a life’s journey is a boat ride. We each are in our boats going along the river of life, and behind us is the wake. The wake represents the past, and even though the wake is always there, it is behind the boat, and demonstrates that the boat if moving forward. No wake, no movement. For healthy, mentally healthy people, they recognize that they are steering the boat, that they need to be looking ahead of them at what might be up the river, hoping to avoid any calamity. This is living both in the moment, attending to the steering, but anticipating what lies upstream. Unfortunately, though, many people, people we understand as mentally unhealthy, they seem to think the wake is steering the boat, that the past is what is guiding their course. They are always looking behind, ignoring both the present and the future.

Certainly, we all have some times of this kind of backward thinking, but life was not meant to be lived trying to move forward while always looking backward. That is a very good way to run into something, often something worse than what is past.

Much of this backward looking has to do with our perception of being wronged. When we cannot get our heads turned around to look forward, when we keep looking back at what was done to us, instead of looking forward to what we might do for ourselves and for others who need our love and attention. In other words, we cannot forgive; we often cannot forgive others, but we also struggle to forgive ourselves.

In this I think the Jewish high holy days give an excellent vehicle of ritual to remind the people of how important it is do not get trapped in the self-perpetuating cycle of anger and bitterness about what was done to us, or the regret and/or denial about what we have done to others. To forgive others, to forgive ourselves is soul-work, spirit-work, that must be done to get on with what always has the potential to be a good life or better life.

When I was doing my intern ministry at the First Unitarian Church in West Newton, Massachusetts under the Rev. Jerry Krick, an incredibly good and kind man, he had just preached about the need to forgive and moved down from the pulpit for the discussion portion that many of our UU congregations have periodically. A woman, I guess in her mid-forties, stood up and shaking with pent up rage said, in effect: “I was horribly abused by my father; I will never forgive him; he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven.”

I remember clearly thinking, she’s right, some things are too awful to be forgiven. But, then, I remember also how Jerry responded. He said that to forgive is not to forget. To forgive is not to ignore or hold accountable. To forgive is not what we do for other people. Forgiveness is what we do for ourselves.

According to the New Testament of the Christian scriptures, Jesus is said to have been asked by someone from the gathering where he had just preached how many times you have to forgive someone who wrongs you, and Jesus responded: seventy times seven. As we know, one of the central tenants of Christianity is this understanding of forgiveness. Because, they say, God forgives us when we sincerely repent our wrongs, then we too are obligated to forgive others. I would add that this is the ideal of Christianity.

At a National Prayer Luncheon several years back, Hillary Clinton stated: In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said seventy times seven. Well, I want you all to know that I'm keeping a chart.

To forgive someone one time seems to be a major challenge for most of us, to forgive some 490 times, is not even in consideration. Yes, we might in the course of life forgive seventy times seven of various transgressions, someone cutting us off in traffic, for instance, but we do not have a high degree of tolerance for someone who repeatedly wrongs us. Nor should we. My own personal belief is that assuming Jesus said that at all-which is always in question-he said it using hyperbole, exaggeration, to make the point that we need to be able to forgive and not count the cost.

I personally struggle with forgiving people who hurt me, most of us do. But I often feel that because I tend to be pretty easy going, do not take offense easily, try to understand that people are sometimes just having a bad day, that when I do finally get really hurt by the actions of another person, I have a hard time letting it go. That is not a good thing in a minister! The transgression stays in my mind, makes me mistrustful of further interactions with that person; makes me avoid the other person entirely if possible. Yet, I know that with a little time, I will get over it, and recognize that it is the wake behind my boat.

There was one time, though, when I had a very hard time forgiving someone and forgiving myself. Often, that is the real problem, that we see our own culpability, how we contributed to the situation that allowed us to get hurt in the first place. I longed for a ritual of forgiveness, something to lift up that I was moving on, so I created one for myself. I had read that someone had done this ritual, and I found it meaningful and powerful for its symbolism, so as that person did, I bought a very nice bottle of wine and a special glass and went down to the Brandywine river early one evening, at dusk when night is on the cusp of becoming. I stood there thinking of all the hurts and sorrow, all that I was mad about, all that I was angry at the other person for, and all that I was angry about with myself, and spilled out all the pent up anger, rage, sadness, and surprising to me at the time, fear; spoke all that to the river whose waters have been with the earth since it formed and will be here until it is destroyed, then I poured a small amount into my glass and spoke all that I hoped for my life, all that I hoped it would bring to me and my children of contentment and joy, and I took a sip to honor the letting go, then I poured the rest of that wine into the river and watched it darken the water with its rich red color for a moment before it was melded into the flowing stream moving on down to join the sea.

We Unitarian Universalists do not have one accepted rite of forgiveness, but we have something we cherish even more, which is respect for the rational process, for reason. Our reason tells us that forgiveness is necessary to moving on with our lives. Retribution does nothing more than momentarily make you feel better; like taking a drug, it feels good for the moment, then soon you need another fix. Only when we can develop a way to move from hurt, to learning (which is important), to forgiveness can that process of life can keep us looking in front of ourselves and not behind.

About the time of all that I was struggling with, in one of those happy coincidences that seem to happen, I read a Ziggy cartoon in the News Journal that said: There’s no future, spending the present, worrying about the past. Some of you have heard me mention this before. It is a profound bit of wisdom, and I still have it taped up in my office at home. It is unquestionably true: there is no future to look forward to, when we waste the present, worrying, regretting, anguishing over things that are in the past and can never be changed. It is irrational to expect that we could.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean you have to keep allowing someone to hurt you, but it also means you don’t keep making an idol of the grievances. Forgiveness most simply means that we learn from the mistakes of the past then move onward leaving the past to the past.

So let me encourage you, if you are holding on to past grievances or the wrongs you have committed, find a way, a ritual if you need it, to let it go. Allow your past to be the wake behind the boat you are steering forward toward the end of your life. We need the reminder, as in the way of Judaism, that our lives will end and not waste life on useless hurts, regrets, and anger.

I can think of no sadder end than to come to one’s dying hours filled with nothing more than a rotten mess of old hurts. Life is meant to be lived in love; lived for something better in the future no matter how bad the past. Let us, then, blow the shofar of the mind for hope for the future, and for our belief in the redeeming possibilities of each new day.

So be it

 

October 16, 2005 Sermon

Nancy D. Dean

October 16, 2005

God: Pure and Simple

Throughout my life I have struggled with belief in God. I have often envied people, like some of you here this morning, who believe in God without question, because, for you, not to believe is simply unthinkable. I can never remember a time when I did not doubt, question, worry, and wonder about God. This is a common condition for many Unitarians. God though, with or without the religions that are associated with God, is always remains a mystery. In fact, for many religions God is called the Great Mystery.

There is no way to prove the existence of God, except in the way many theologians have attempted, and even the philosopher Mortimer Adler came to this conclusion, which is to say that because there is a creation, one must assume a creator. No one can prove God exists but no one can prove God does not exist either, both are equivalent mysteries.

The first conclusion Unitarians came to about God is stated in our name, Uni-tarian; clearly stating that God is One, not three as the Trinity concept has it. For most of our Unitarian history it was generally accepted that God existed, but with the 20th Century, two world wars and the Depression between them, many people rejected any notion of a God; especially the idea of a God that in any way intervenes in the affairs of human beings. We saw a great rise of humanism/non-theism within our movement, which is still prevalent today. But throughout our history even to this day, there have been many Unitarians, and of course Universalists, who have believed in God, though not of a God that punishes in the way of most of the religions that derive from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. And few believe in God who is out there somewhere granting wishes. Or, as Harry Emerson Fosdick, the famous minister of the Riverside Church in New York, said of this idea of God: God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom one can press a button to get things.

There is nothing new under the sun when it come to a discussion about God. The perplexities about the nature of God has been pondered and argued from every conceivable angle, and we remain right where we started with no real proof of God in the sense of something that cannot be denied, like gravity for example.

Karen Armstrong, the British writer on religions, herself a former nun, is an agnostic (a person who neither believes nor denies the possibility of a God), writes that the one compelling fact is that some version of a supreme being is worshipped everywhere which no doubt relates to this notion that because we exist, we were created, there must therefore be a creator.

Many of the arguments about the nature of God are related to the perceived proper way one is to know and worship God, and this is reflected in the hundreds, indeed thousands, of different religions that exist in the world. One of the first things theologians as scholars try to do in examining the who-what-where-when-how of God, is to separate God from the human constructions of religions or religious institutions. God must be seen as outside of any one religion, though clearly many believers would not accept that, but this is our UU position. My belief, shared by most of my colleagues, is that God is not in the building business. That makes me think of the Milton Berle joke: God took six days to compete the world. But that was in the days before building permits.

No one has God in a box, or any single place or institution. Many UUs, such as myself, believe that the world reflects any understanding we might have of God; this was Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson’s position. Emerson said that everything we need to know about God you can see in the world around us. We conclude, with Emerson, that the world is diverse in every aspect. There is not just one kind of flower, or worm, or human being, so why would there be just one way to be religious or spiritual. Clearly, there is not just one way, but thousands of ways as the existence of all the many different religions points out. So the one thing that I believe without question, at this point in my life, is that if there is a God, God intends for there to be diversity. I would no more suggest there should be only one religion, only UUism, than I would suggest there should be only one breakfast food. Both notions are ridiculous. Further, all these ways of understanding God must be necessary or they would not exist. Our way, our Unitarian Universalist way, exists because you and I need it. When people no longer need a form of belief or practice, it ceases to exist. As far as I know, there are no people who actively worship the ancient Greek pantheon, though they did for thousands of years, by way of example.

The main issue I have with most people’s idea of God is this belief that God is some independent entity, sitting out beyond the moon somewhere, zapping or gifting people arbitrarily. The minister Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) said that the hurricane disaster in New Orleans was God punishing that city for its evil ways. What nonsense! Why not wipe out the earth permanently then? For, there is no place that is a whole lot more evil than another, no place a whole lot better. There are certainly people who are a lot more evil than others, but there are far more good people than bad, otherwise the world would be in absolute and utter chaos.

A God that can only speak to certain people is also a God I have no interest in, for my study of history and the present tells me that most of the people who talk to and for God are not up for any Nobel Prizes for humanitarianism. We also know that a great deal of evil has been done in God’s name; this is purely power speaking for power. Again, I want no truck with that kind of God.

My mother is a devout believer in God, and I have tried to both accept this God in my youth, and in my adult years I have tried always to respect her right to her beliefs. I am not in the business of trying to destroy the beliefs of others, especially when it is so clear that people need the beliefs they hold on to, or they would not hold on to them so tenaciously. But one time early in my college days, in the context of some conversation about why something awful had happened, I think it was a famine, my mother had stated that it was God’s will. I retorted before thinking (a characteristic of youth): God has a lot to answer for! I thought my mother would faint; she was so sure that I had brought down the wrath of the Almighty on myself. She may have even moved away from me physically; and, I suppose that is when I realized psychologically, spiritually, that I had moved away from her way of believing forever.

My sermon title is in one way misleading, for the truth of the matter is that there is nothing pure or simple about God. At least, not in the human grappling with the nature of God. There is nothing but complexity in that exercise. Yet, underneath all that, I do believe that if there is a God, a Creator that we reflect in our being, then that God is pure and that God is simple.

Personally, I don’t think it matters if you believe in God, even if there is a God; what matters is what you do with what you believe. If what you do is good for people, all people, then surely that will be good in the sight of God. If there is a God who set us down on this earth with a prescribed way to worship, but didn’t tell us all what it was, then we are in trouble anyway; for what kind of God would make it so hard for people to figure out what they should do, how they should worship, that it would be like telling a blind man to paint a picture of stranger.

I like the Gnostic writer of the Testimony of Truth, in the Gnostic Gospels, who points out the logical deductions one can arrive at from the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. I like it because the writer was doing what intelligent people do: the writer was using his brain, thinking, attempting to understand. That is what the Greek word gnosis really means, knowing as understanding or wisdom. That has been my adult approach to life, to keep learning, keep trying to gain greater understanding, and hopefully to arrive at some level of wisdom about the nature of human spirituality.

After all, we have been given these brains of ours for a reason; we have not developed brains to abandon all reason. Martin Gardner, a man who has written passionately about science, for science, believes in God. A large and loving understanding of God, to be sure, primarily in the vein of the theologian Paul Tillich who described God as Ultimate Reality, and he does not apologize for believing. He believes in that which is ultimately good within our human family as having both source and expression, this for him is God. That would be how I would describe God, too, but I never feel the comfortable certainty that Gardner does. For me, belief like Gardner’s would be the most I can believe; for me God must be that which is everywhere without exception, in no guise that only some could recognize, existing in all places among all peoples, and is a positive force in the world. The only thing that fits that definition for me is love; so if God is love, pure and simple, I believe in that God.

My beliefs are always qualified by the word if; a very simple word, two letters, yet those two letters encompass all the complexity of the world. I would also remind you that the word if takes up three pages of small print in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.

Most religious people would say I am agnostic at best, and in fact non-theist; that is what they would say based on their own systems. I say that I have a theology of If, God is If. If this were not so, then there would be no discussion. I do not hear anyone discussing whether or not you have to breathe or sleep, because there is no if; the results of not doing either are readily evident. For me this must also be the nature of God, if God is in the world.

One writer, whose name I cannot recall, said that to pose the question of whether there is a God is the same as posing a question like: Are apples oranges?--the question itself doesn’t make any sense. This same writer says babies are born atheists, meaning they don’t believe in God until they are taught to believe(I would say that babies are a tabula rosa, a blank slate). When I read this, I thought of the feral children I studied about in my child development classes; children who do not, and furthermore, cannot learn language because it was not taught to them in the critical first three years of life. So, perhaps he is right. Maybe to even ask the question of who or what is God is pointless. Yet, here we are asking anyway.

I believe we are all spiritual beings, born with tremendous capacities for caring, but we are also born with a capacity for hate and destruction. Someone wrote that if people really did believe in the God they profess, the world would be a whole lot different, meaning better; but I doubt it, since from my observation people who do believe in God pretty much believe in the God they need. For many that is a vengeful, wrathful God. For many, it is a God of love and peace. For many, maybe most believers, it is a generally a God of indifference until a crisis occurs.

While I cannot give you any certainties about the existence or non-existence of God, while I cannot tell you I absolutely believe in or do not believe in God, because I do not know. I can tell you that living a principled life will make you a better, happier person. I can tell you that loving people is always better than the alternatives. I can tell you that it perfectly fine with me for people to believe whatever they need to, as long as they leave me free to believe what I need. I can tell you that living ethically is always better for everyone.

So, for those who believe God, may God help to live as good people; for those who do not believe, may you live as good people because you know it is the right and decent way to live-pure and simple. Either way you will have a much better life.

So be it.

[Steve, this sermon generated a great deal of feedback and people asked for these readings to be included]

Readings:

From Testimony of Truth(one of the Gnostic Gospels),The Enemy Within, Elaine Pagels

But the author of the Testimony of Truth goes far beyond the "protesting" Christians of the Reformation and later times. Convinced that Christ's message is precisely the opposite of "the law"-that is, the Hebrew Bible-this teacher raises radical questions:

      What is the light? And what is the darkness? And who is the one who created the world? And who is God? And who are the angels?. . . And what is the governance (of the world)? And why are some lame, and some blind, and some rich, and some poor?34

Approaching the Genesis story with questions like these, this teacher "discovers" that it reveals truth only when one reads it in reverse, recognizing that God is actually the villain, and the serpent the holy one! This teacher points out, for example, that in Genesis 2:17, God commands Adam not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the midst of Paradise, warning that "on the day that you shall eat of it, you shall die." But the serpent tells Eve the opposite: "You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (3:4-5). Who, asks the Testimony, told the truth? When Adam and Eve obeyed the serpent, "then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked" (3:7). They did not die "on that day," as God had warned; instead, their eyes were opened to knowledge, as the serpent had promised. But when God realized what had happened, "he cursed the serpent, and called him 'devil' " (Gen. 3:14-15).35 Now that Adam had attained godlike knowledge, God decided to evict him from Paradise, "lest he reach out his hand and eat of the tree of life and live forever" (Gen. 3:22), attaining eternal life along with knowledge.

"What kind of god is this god? . . . Surely he has shown him­self to be a malicious envier,"36 says the author of the Testimony. Not only is this god jealous of his own creation, he is also igno­rant and vindictive. And what of the serpent, whom God cursed and called "devil"? According to the Testimony of Truth, the serpent who led Adam and Eve to spiritual enlightenment is actually Christ, appearing in this disguise in Paradise to release Adam and Eve from "the error of the angels"37-that is, error induced by malevolent supernatural "rulers," who masquerade as God in this world.

 

From The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, Martin Gardner:

Whenever I speak of religious faith it will mean a belief, unsupported by logic or science, in both God and an afterlife. Bertrand Russell once defined faith, in a broader way, as "a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence." If "evidence" means the kind of support provided by reason and science, there is no evidence for God and immortality,. and Russell's definition seems to me concise and ad­mirable.

Faith of this pure sort, uncontaminated by evidence, is easily car­icatured. In "The Will to Believe" William James quotes a schoolboy remark: "Faith is when you believe something you know ain't true." No fideist accepts this, of course, but if we alter it to "Faith is when you believe something you don't know is true," it is not a bad defi­nition.

 

 

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