God
Given by James Covington on September 16th, 2007
Thank you for being here this morning, especially if you are visiting us for the first time. I don’t know what you know about Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps you know that we are a non-dogmatic, liberal religious affiliation. Our slogan is “Many Beliefs, One Faith.” You probably wonder what in the world we mean by that. Well, basically it means that we welcome people with different theological/humanist/spiritual beliefs. We have no dogma that insists you must believe certain theological statements if you are to be considered a true believer, or saved from eternal damnation or otherwise considered an infidel. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can believe anything you want! We do have strong ethical and moral principles by which we try to live, which you can read on the back of our program and which we believe are grounded in the best intentions of most religious faiths. The principles embody our faith.
Religion is the human response to the shocking reality of life and death. We know we are alive and also know we shall die. The religious impulse is a natural impulse, like the sexual impulse. The great sociologist , Emile Durkheim wrote the human being is first a religious animal–in the beginning, all is religious, he wrote. This religious impulse leads humans to wonder about their existence, the purpose of it, the origin of it, and their personal human destiny. The religious impulse leads to a sense of responsibility for existence, that is, how people should live together, treat one another. The religious impulse seeks connection with others. Religion from the Greek “religio” means that which binds together–that which connects humans with one another, and ultimately with the creator–that energy which is greater than all yet present in each, or God.
The sexual impulse is also natural and is also there from the beginning of time. The sexual impulse serves obviously to propagate, reproduce, but also to connect, form families, provide nurturance. The sexual impulse can be mis-used of course, to rape, commit incest, for prostitution, pornography and for impersonal reasons. The sexual impulse followed in this way, leads to disconnection, disregard, betrayal and violation of others. The religious impulse can also be misused by the human beings in their quest for power and certainty, to allay their fears and anxieties about an estranged, powerless life without purpose. In other words, in and of themselves, both the religious and the sexual impulse are good impulses!.. they lead to connection and meaning when followed with responsibility and compassion. What often happens is that human beings misuse them, corrupt them and make them destructive. It is not sex per se or religious faith per se that is bad. They are not the culprits leading to destruction, wars, annihilation, alienation and control. Human beings are the culprits.
As you know there are a number of authors who have recently derided religious faith. Rightly so in many respects. But they are talking about literalist religion, the kind of religion that controls people’s minds and people’s right to think independently and leads to servitude and eventually meaninglessness. I gave up that kind of religion years ago. I congratulate Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens for their enlightenment and hopefully they will now become Unitarian Universalists, (doubtful!) who are liberal religious human beings who strive to keep open minds, open hearts and live purposefully in the world by following values of compassion, love, justice and peace. These are the values of true religious faith, whether your are Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, or Christian and UUs. But we are human. Even UUs make bad decisions, act selfishly, speak arrogantly and contemptuously about others. God forgive us!
The God that the atheist authors write about these days is a literalist God, a supernatural being in the sky who dictates his laws and dogma and condemns infidels to hell. That God doesn’t exist. Never did, in my opinion. So does God not exist at all? I believe God does exist. I can’t prove that. Woody Allen once said: “If only God would give me a clear sign, like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank account!” If only. Yet, I do believe. So let me explain.
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 supposed 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 grandmother and for people who were starving in some far off place, and for the “lost” unsaved people who didn’t believe in Jesus. 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 and for my alcoholic father, that he would stop drinking.
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 for some of you, 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. 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.
Think of your own ideas about God and how they changed over time. Where are you today? Do you still have an image of God? I know for a fact that for many of us have 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–a mysterious connection with universal being.
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 had 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.
The Episcopal 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.
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 supernatural god as a person, 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, 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. Neither 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. 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.
For me God, or 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 Catskills and Adirondacks 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.
When I was 16, I and five other guys were sitting together around a mess-hall table in church camp one summer. We started talking about God and Jesus and life and sex and girls and baseball. In the process, we all started feeling something very mysterious, but no one knew at first that everyone else was feeling the same thing. Then someone said, “You know, I feel strange, I feel like there is a presence in the room. Maybe it’s Jesus! And the hair stood up on our heads because we admitted that we were all feeling the same thing. It was a powerful moment in my life and at that point I decided to become a minister! I was 16! But what was that about? It was a mystery. It was a presence. It was a connection with all that is, that which is greater than myself and yet present within. It was the God above God!
And sometimes, you know, when we are all gathered here, singing, laughing, and a tear starts flowing here and there, and in moment of silence or meditation or a word being spoken, we all become still. And we are all connected. We are one. What’s happening then? What is the presence in the room at that moment?
My friend, love what you love. Be faithful to that love. Love one another. This is what it means to be close to God.
I close with the words of the late Dag Hammarskjöld from his spiritual diary, Markings. Possibly he puts into words how I live with the God question:
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.