Reading
From Bishop John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die
“Karen Armstrong, in her insightful book A History of God, has demonstrated that Jews, Christians and Muslims were all at one time accused of being atheists when their ideas began to challenge the popular religious wisdom of their day. It is almost typical of religious people to make idols out of their religious words. Perhaps in the quest for security, they identify their concept of God with God. When that concept is challenged, they think God is being challenged. That is why no concept of God can ever be more than a limited human construct, and personal words about God, we must learn to admit, reveal not God but our own yearning. So believers…are forced to face the fact today that all Bibles, creeds, doctrines, prayers, and hymns are nothing but religious artifacts created to allow us to speak of our God experience at an earlier point in our history. But history has moved us to a place where the literal content of these artifacts is all but meaningless, the traditional definitions inoperative, and the symbols no longer competent pointers to reality. Part of the nature of [our] experience is that it is a death watch for God as we have known that God. The anxiety…is that in human history no dying concept of God has ever yet been resuscitated. Theism, as a way of conceiving of God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is also probably not revivable.
Chalice Lighting, by Sandy Prins
My earliest memory of a God image is of walking with a friend to a neighborhood grocery store in a downpour when I was five or six, chanting “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring.“ Though I’m quite sure I didn’t think that thunder was actually the sound of God snoring, I did believe there was an old man with a long white beard up in heaven who was causing it to rain. I thought of him as rather stern but loving and wise, thought he watched over me every minute of the day and night and that he also had the ability to see everything else that went on in the world.
As I grew up in my slightly unorthodox Methodist family where questions and discussions about God were encouraged, my ideas of God became a little more sophisticated, but they remained quite traditional, including belief in a personal god and an all-knowing creator of the universe. But by the time I was a junior or senior in h.s. I rather shocked my friends in the youth group by saying that I thought God was as likely to be a woman, as a man, and I started using feminine pronouns when speaking of God whenever I thought I could get away with it. What a wonderfully liberating feeling for a young woman! By the time I was a freshman in college, the Methodist minister suggested that I might be happier in the Unitarian Church. What an exciting path he opened up for me!
I have been involved in UU youth religious education for almost 50 years, where I have had the opportunity to learn and teach about many religious and spiritual traditions. Through the years I have also suffered through enough of life’s challenges to have seriously tested my various ideas about God. I’m not sure but I first stopped believing in a personal god, and then later stopped believing in an all-knowing creator of the universe, and, in truty, I prefer not to use the word ‘God’ with all of its baggage. But I continue to have a strong feeling that there is something greater than I am, something mysterious and profound and, being human, I continue to search for answers to what I not call the Divine, or the Spirit of Life and Love, or the Great Mystery.
In the past five years I have stepped up my search and my effort to define it. I have had some profound ‘other worldly’ experiences, and acknowledged others that I‘d dismissed in earlier years. I began meditating on a daily basis, combining several methods that deepen that process for me, including adopting the Blue Mountain Meditation group’s use of memorized spiritual passages and also participating rather regularly in the Sangha, the Buddhist community that meets twice monthly here at JUC. I re-examined my Christian background, studied the Christian mystics, and reclaimed some of the strong beliefs that I realized had been guiding my life since childhood. I learned about amazing new discoveries in science, especially astronomy - discoveries about the heavens where I once believed my old-man-God lived.
And so, for the moment at least, this is what I believe, based on my understanding of science and my intuition: For me the Divine is that which inspires awe and touches my heart: the power and magnificence of nature, the preciousness of life, the beauty of the arts, the feeling of being part of something inexplicable that is so much larger than myself. I understand it as energy that is within every cell of my being, in every particle of what we often call inanimate objects like rocks, and at the same time the Divine is outside of me and I am enveloped within the field of energy itself. It is an energy so powerful that it is ever-expanding beyond unimaginable universes, and yet can be as gentle as a sleeping baby‘s breath. It resides in the tangible, like our beautiful Rocky Mountains, and the intangible, like the creative imaginations of our children. For me, and I’ve believed this part since I was a child, the most important part of the Divine is the energy of love and compassion so vital for all of life.
I light the chalice this morning in honor of each person’s search their own answer for the Great Mystery.
Sermon
Let’s do a little time travel. Let yourself go back to when you were six years old. Try to recapture the way you experienced the world as a six year old. Recall playing with other kids. Remember how going to school was an exciting new adventure outside the home. If you were fortunate, you had parents and a teacher who made you feel loved and safe.
Now try to recapture what the word “God” meant back then. When I was six God was a part of my life. We went to church every Sunday. I learned that God was Jesus’ father. I learned that God had made everything. I also learned that God was watching me and judging me. Also, I was told that if I prayed very hard for something, God was likely to grant my wish. Of course, I was not suppose to pray for things like a chemistry set or a new baseball glove. God expected requests that were more noble, like praying for my parents, my sister and for people who were starving in some far off place. It was also all right to pray to get well when I was sick. And it was especially OK to pray for God to take care of my mother when she was in the hospital for an operation.
When I was six, God was a person. God was male. God was loving, but in a distant and judgmental kind of way. God was all powerful. God saw everything. When I was six my God, like so many human males, had a temper. When he got really mad he killed thousands of people, like when he drowned Pharaoh's army or killed the first born sons of the Egyptians. A long time ago God liked the Jews better than anybody else, but not any more. It seemed like a good idea to stay on God’s good side. The God I grew up with had a son named Jesus. Jesus seemed a lot nicer than God. He never killed anyone. The only time he seemed to lose his temper was when he threw the money changers out of the temple—and they had it coming. Besides, no one got hurt.
I bet that when you were six your God was a lot like mine. God used to work miracles a long time ago. And He was very much in charge. (I find it fascinating that I had already written all the above before I read Sandy Prins’ chalice lighting. I see that Sandy and I grew up with the same image of God.)
As I grew up God and I changed. God and I became more sophisticated. My God got more abstract. I came to see that images of God were not constant. The God of Genesis and Exodus seemed a lot different from the God of the Gospel According to John or St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
I also learned that different people had different ideas about God. There were all kinds of Christian churches. My church was right, of course. The others were wrong. God was supposed to love everyone so much that he sent his son, who was also God, to die so that I could spend eternity in heaven. It seemed very odd to me that such a God would also condemn people in far off lands who had not heard of him to eternal damnation. And there was the troubling matter of children who died before being baptized.
Think of your own ideas about God and how they changed over time. You obviously would not be in here today if you still held on to the image you had of God when you were six.
So, where are you today? Do you still have an image of God? I know for a fact that for many of us simply rejected the whole notion of God. Others have adopted some variety of agnosticism. Some of us are gentle agnostics who are simply unsure of what (or whom) to believe about God. Some of us are more militant agnostics. I saw a bumper sticker a couple of years ago that gave me a chuckle. It read, “Militant agnostic. I don’t know—and you don’t either.” We have a smattering of hard core atheists. And some of us believe in a God, but in a God that is beyond gender, beyond judgment—a God that is more of a feeling for our sense of awe than an entity to be known.
Wherever you and I are today, we have come a long, long way from whatever God we knew when we were six.
Actually, we have come a long, long way as human beings. Before there was writing, there was a strong sense of religion. People have have gods as long as we have been human. (I sometimes wonder if chimps and gorillas have some rough equivalent.) Before there was God, of course, there were gods. The idea of there being just one God is a pretty modern idea. It began with the Hebrews and continued through what have been called the “Abrahamic faiths”: Christianity and Islam in addition to Judaism.
So, if we look past our own individual history and look at our history as human beings, we see that the image of God we had as six year olds, the image we were taught by our families and at church, is a fairly modern monotheism.
For most of human history and prehistory, there were all sorts of gods. There were fertility gods and gods of the hunt and gods that made thunder. The Greeks even seem to have had gods that were a lot like the idle rich and had the habit of making trouble just to amuse themselves. The Greek gods seemed to have the morality of a party school fraternity.
Why do you suppose people all over the world had gods? From our modern perspective, we think that they invented these gods. Yet why so many gods at first? And why, in time, did polytheism give way to monotheism? I do not pretend to understand this fully.
At one level, of course, the gods served as a substitute for science. Gods were responsible for the changing seasons, for the sun moving across the sky, for good or bad harvests, for the weather, and so on. At another level, gods clearly served as a way of helping people create a common identity. A people were defined by what gods they worshipped—much in the way that today people derive their identity from what flag they salute and what language they speak.
Ancient people accepted that there were not only a lot of gods, but that each tribe or nation had its own gods. The Egyptians had their gods, the Greeks had theirs, the Sumarians had theirs, the Babylonians had theirs, and so forth. Even in the Hebrew scriptures, we see that the writers assumed that there were other gods. Indeed, the god of the Hebrews is a jealous god that prohibits the people from having any other gods.
What, I wonder, gave rise to all these gods? Even a hard core atheist would have to agree that there is something in human experience and in the human psyche that tilts towards gods and religion.
I suspect that one common denominator of being human is the sense that there are powers and even realities that we cannot understand. The experience of awe, wonder, and mystery is a fundamental human experience.
Perhaps our early gods have died off because their work was done. We don’t have much use today for a god of thunder. We understand the physics of lightning and thunder pretty well. We don’t need a god of winter or summer. Science has taught us about the tilt of the earth’s axis and the annual journey around the sun. We know why it is warmer in the summer and why the days are longer.
When there their work is done, old gods retire and eventually die.
The Jewish people, at the crossroads of ancient civilizations, hit upon the idea that there was one god above all others. Eventually this became the notion that there was only one god. Perhaps all the gods of all the people around them just seemed like too many. For reasons that are not completely understood, the idea of one god took hold and, in time, became a dominant and powerful point of view. All of us grew up in world dominated by monotheism.
In this morning’s reading, Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong takes the view that the god of theism, god seen as a kind of super human person, is no longer relevant. His argument is that, just as all the many gods of polytheistic cultures gave way before a new vision of one god, so too the view of god we grew up with is dying. Spong suggests that we stop asking “who” God is and perhaps ask “what” God is.
Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, went so far as to suggest that we stop talking about God for a hundred years. Tillich’s point is that the word “God” had become so linked with outmoded ways of thinking that it could not be used to communicate anything important. Tillich also once suggested that atheists were closer to God than theists. I tend to agree with Tillich on the use of the word “God.” I don’t use it very often simply because its common meaning is hopelessly antiquated and the more sophisticated meanings of the term tend to get all confused with primitive ones.
Yet something fundamentally human connects you and me with our ancestors of thousands of years ago. In their ignorance of the natural world, they found themselves living in a mysterious world they did not understand. Their primitive theologies gave expression to their sense of awe, to their sense of a great mystery, to their sense that they were a very small and powerless part of a vast creation.
What irony. You and I live in a time when science has given us compelling explanations of almost everything our prehistoric ancestors found mysterious. Yet even with our vast knowledge we find ourselves once more a tiny part of a vast mystery. In some ways, our sense of awe should be greater than that of early humans. We have a much clearer sense of just how tiny we are and of how much we do not know.
Think about this for a moment. Reflect for a moment on modern cosmology. We have an army of scientists with amazing research instruments at their disposal. All our discoveries, wondrous as they are, present us with a universe that is more awesome and mysterious than the one my ancestors lived in 50,000 years ago. We don’t know what most of the universe is made of. We call it dark matter and dark energy. We can see and measure the gravitational effects, but we can’t find it. Some scientists actually believe there are many universes. As if this one were not vast enough.
I guess deep down I mostly agree with the militant agnostics. I don’t know. I don’t anyone who does know. And I am deeply suspicious of people who think they do know.
So, if we move beyond the God of theism, what is there? Are we left with nothing but cold science and a universe without meaning? What do we do with our deep and permanent human yearning that is the source of all religion? If we abandon our outmoded view of God are we left with nothing but cold rationality and lives that have no meaning?
No. Not at all.
*First, I believe, we need to stop asking the wrong questions. I believe that to ask “What is God like?” is the wrong question. There is no way of answering it. Similarly, I believe the question “What does God want me to do?” is a wrong question. Both of those questions assume that God is some sort of person.
I believe we should begin by affirming a virtue that all religions teach: humility. Humility is the true response to our sense of awe and mystery.
Then, I believe, we ask ourselves this: What is most precious to me? What is so precious to me, what is it that I love so deeply, so intensely, that I want my love of it to guide my life? What do we, together, as a religious people, love so much that we want our lives to be filled with it?
Maybe this is the God beyond God. It is for me.
Should we name this core of what we love most and what we hold sacred “God”? I don’t think it matters what we name it. Language captures so little of the raw experience of awe, love, and connection. The experience matters; the name does not.
When we ask ourselves what we love most, and when we ask each other what we love most, something amazing happens. We are not all that much different. We love life. We wish to love each other deeply and know one another deeply. In the Christian scriptures, the Gospel of John speaks about God being love.
When I have asked people what they love the most, they talk about relationships: their life partner, their children, their family, their friends. They talk about things that move them to tears. They speak of beauty that touches their souls: mountain meadows, soaring eagles, music that touches their hearts, great art that inspires. They talk about holding a newborn and holding a dying parent. They talk about finding a deep peace, about feeling at one with all of life and all of the universe. This is what Taoists call the Tao, or the way. This is what Buddhists call enlightenment. Being totally overcome by this love is what Christians call being born again in the spirit.
I will never know ultimate reality. I will never understand all the mysteries of the universe. Either will you.
I do know what I love deeply. I need to remind myself all the time, but I know what I love. We need to remind each other. That is what worship is all about. But you and I know what we love.
That, I suggest to you, is our God beyond God. What we hold most precious is what you and I need to be faithful to. What we love is the god that can shape our lives and give our lives meaning. Devoting our lives to what we love is what it means to be religious, what it means to be faithful.
This how we find the God beyond God. We must get in touch, really in touch, with what we love. We must allow that passion for life and love and beauty to fill our spirits. And finally, we must let that love guide our lives.
This, I suggest to you in all humility, is how we will come to know the God beyond God. And this is all the theology you and I ever need to know.
Love what you love. Be faithful to that love. This is what it means to be close to God.
Amen.