SERMONS 

Reclaiming Faith

A few months ago I was quite certain about my topic for this morning. However, in the time since I settled on the idea of preaching about the language of faith, I’ve found it more and more daunting. Who am I to stand here and talk about god? After all, I really like my job here! And I know that what I have to say this morning may not sit well with all of you.

I am reminded, however, of some words many of us said to Susan Gray a few weeks ago at her ordination – we would have you speak the truth as you understand it. While that statement was made in a particular situation, we expect the same from each other as members of this community of faith, and we certainly expect it of those who stand in this pulpit. Emboldened by the support inherent in our covenant with one another, I will dare to speak the truth as I understand it. And here it is:

I believe in god.

Shew! Well, there you have it. Out of the proverbial closet of faith. I believe in god! And I would be willing to bet that I am not the only one here who would say so. I would even bet that there are some here who believe in god even though they are quite certain that they do not. It is, after all, a tricky thing believing in god. What does it mean? And more importantly, why does it matter?

Those are the two big questions I’m going to attempt to deal with this morning. What does it mean for me, or for any of us, to say that we believe in god? And does the fact of our belief or unbelief make any real difference in our lives, or in the life of our community?

Well, it’s time to start qualifying some terms. A word like “god” is a difficult one for many of us because of the meanings we have assigned to it. They are as varied as the life experiences we bring to this service this morning. In fact, let’s take a moment to hear some of them. What comes to mind when you hear the word “god”? (pause for answers)

Isn’t it interesting that most of us, when asked if we believe in god or not, can usually come up with a relatively quick, clear answer? And yet obviously we are nowhere close to being in agreement as to what the word means.

I’m going to share with you some of my ideas about the god of my understanding. But before I do, I’m going to take it from the opposite perspective. We Unitarian Universalists seem to be quite good at this – not really being sure of what something is, but being absolutely sure of what it is not. This is an important point, and I’ll take it up again later. But for now, let me tell you about the god I don’t believe in.

I do not believe in a god who condemns that which has been created in his (yes, his) own image, no matter how that creation finds love among its own kind. I do not believe in a god who favors one nation over another, nor, for that matter, one football team over another. I do not believe in a god who could demand the death of his own son as a means of appeasing his own unwillingness to forgive. And I do not believe in a god who wields supreme power over the human condition yet uses it only sparingly. Such a god would not even be worth my time, much less my worship.

I could go on – I do not believe in a god who looks like me, talks like me, acts like me, or thinks that anyone who doesn’t look, talk or act like me is any less worthy of love. I do not believe in a god who limits himself to any one definition, or who delights in the eradication of those whose definition does not jive with the one held by the powerful and the wealthy. I do not believe in a god who rewards destruction of any kind for any reason. Nor do I believe in a god who micromanages the clock of our individual lives, deciding when each person’s time has expired.

My current favorite in this litany of non-beliefs came to me the other day from a minister friend in New York. He said, “[god] isn't a slot machine where you put in a prayer and get a prize.” I love that.

There are many, however, for whom the god I have just described is exactly the god they believe in. Traditionally one who believes in such a god is called a theist. Bishop John Shelby Spong, a retired Anglican bishop who has made a name for himself through his radical revisioning of Christianity, defines theism as the belief in “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will.” He also claims that this god, the god of theism, is dying, or is in fact already dead.

For a long stretch of human history, the theistic concept of god was at once reassuring and terrifying. God made life and destroyed it – food, weather, fire – all were under the auspices of god’s power. Sickness or health were given by god as a punishment or reward for one’s behavior, and god’s favor meant certain victory in battle, while a displeased god would leave one vulnerable to slaughter at the hands of one’s enemies.

The advances of modern science and technology have rendered most of these characteristics of god not only errant but also laughable. We have discovered germs and ways to fight them, and we know that the better-funded and better-equipped army tends to win the war. The keys to god’s omnipotence seem to have been handed over to the rubrics of the scientific method, and for most of us there is no turning back from this course and heading.

However, many of those who do not accept the death of theism entrench themselves in fundamentalism, which stares into the face of modernity, denies its existence, and offers a humankind a pacifier which is comforting and immensely popular, but which will not suffice for long. Many ministers simply ignore the problem by refusing to acknowledge the question itself, choosing rather to perpetuate their own power and authority while their flocks continue wandering in the wilderness of a belief system which cannot sustain them.

As many of you know, I was once a catholic seminarian and then for a few years was a Franciscan brother. When people ask me about why I left, they often seem surprised that it wasn’t just about celibacy (yes, it had something to do with celibacy, but that’s another sermon for another time). The main reason I left catholic religious life was that I found that I had stopped believing in god. I simply couldn’t bring myself to believe in the god I’ve just described to you, and in the absence of any alternatives I came to the conclusion that I must be an atheist. And in the years that followed I found atheism to be a cold, lifeless, lonely place – a place where my hunger for communion with the divine went unsated and where I was wracked with spiritual thirst.

The atheism I came to embrace was not really the result of a conscious choice. It was more like a default option that I just accepted uncritically. I didn’t claim it as some of you do – as a position which you have worked out through the crucible of your own lives (and let me assure you of my respect for this position – it’s not, however, the atheism to which I subscribed). My atheism was something I just shrugged about when people asked the inevitable questions about my beliefs. “I guess I’m an atheist,” I would say. Not exactly the kind of enthusiasm one might expect when talking about one of the great questions of existence.

And yet it seems that there are many out there who hold to the kind of atheism I half-heartedly embraced. In an article in this month’s Harper’s magazine called “The Poverty of Unbelief,” Jonathon Ree sarcastically observes that tacit atheism “fits perfectly with the one thing we moderns have always known: that the progressive rise of literacy, free expression, and democracy is bound in the long run to neutralize the toxic mixture of superstition, ignorance, manipulation, and self-hatred that constitutes religious belief.” His point is that the kind of atheism many in my generation hold to is simply the result of rejecting the theistic notions of god – a task that in our modern world takes little intellectual effort on our part. He says, “if tacit atheism has become the default belief of our age, it needs to be noted that it is no longer the badge of a courageous free spirit but, more often than not, the ‘do not disturb’ sign hung out by the intellectually inert.”

As I said earlier, we Unitarian Universalists have a penchant for spending a great deal of time and breath talking about all of the things we don’t believe in. This is often referred to as the via negativa, or the negative way. Tacit atheism is the result of the spiritual via negativa – rejecting the ideas that are out there, and accepting non-belief in the absence of anything better.

But is there any way for us to talk about god by means of a via positiva? That is, can we say anything meaningful about what god is rather than what god is not? I believe we can, though I think we’re going to stumble if we try to postulate about god when we’re already pretty sure that god doesn’t exist.

One way to get at this problem is to talk about our most deeply held values. Some of the basic values I hold to are justice, compassion, and love, and I would imagine that many of you do so as well. I believe that a perfect world would be one governed by these values. And yet I find that these words, like the word “god,” are elusive words whose definitions cannot be concretely formed.

How can we say that we value justice and yet not be able to say exactly what justice is? How can we strive to be more compassionate and loving without being able to demonstrate it or come up with an illustration that will show others what we mean? Yet while we may not be able to take some love, put it in a box and set it on this table for everyone to see, we know that there is such a thing as love. Hopefully we have all experienced it – we have all, at one time or another, given and received love. We also know, however, that our experiences of love are always incomplete, that they are always somehow lacking. Perhaps this is why we hold love as a value – because we know that our experience of it is limited, and thus we continually strive to make it more complete. It is as if we know that love exists because we have experienced it, however incompletely, and we know that, as the song says, there is more love somewhere.

So our values are abstract concepts which we nonetheless know to exist because we have experienced them. We yearn to live our values because we believe that somehow we can be more just, more compassionate, more loving. It’s as though we believe that there is some thing out there called love, and that we can see glimpses of it in the experiences of our lives. Knowing that it is out there, knowing that love is a possibility, shapes our lives such that we strive to make it a piece of who we are everyday. This is at the core of what it means to hold something as a value.

It is not by accident, however, that many of the great spiritual writers throughout history have spoken of god in terms of these same values. They do not simply say that god is just, compassionate and loving, but that god IS justice, god IS compassion, and god IS love. In fact, while I have rejected the theistic notion that god is a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, I certainly believe that love is all of those things. Understanding god as the embodiment of my most deeply held values makes my renewed faith in god a reality. When I say that I believe in god, I affirm the possibility that my values are not held in vain, that they are real and my experience of them is valid. When I say that I believe in god, I affirm my own human potential to live out those values that I hold by recognizing that I can live more justly, compassionately and lovingly than I do right now. And most importantly, when I say that I believe in god I recognize my own incompleteness, and the certainty of my own failure, again and again, to live my values in every moment of my life. Again quoting Jonathon Ree, “Believing in a God also means recognizing the possibility of an intelligence that sees things differently from you, and far better too. In that respect religious belief is a standing lesson in tolerance and pluralism…It is simply a reminder that the way you look at things is only the way you look at things, and that, however well supported it may seem, it could still, for all you know, be thoroughly and ridiculously mistaken.”

So I’ll say it again – I believe in god! (Can I get an amen?) But does the fact that we say we do or do not believe in god really matter? For us as Unitarian Universalists I believe it does. After all, like it or not, the name our movement uses is an affirmation of belief in god. Granted, it does not affirm a theological system that plays nicely with the theistic model, but nonetheless our name proclaims our collective adherence to belief in god. And believe me, even though we like to underplay the theological significance of our name, others outside of our tradition are quite sure that they know what it means.

When someone asks what the words Unitarian or Universalist mean, many of us are quick to say that these terms don’t hold any real significance for us anymore. But is that true? I believe that they can be very meaningful for us today, and that we tread on dangerous ground when we dismiss our theological heritage so easily.

Forrest Church’s image of the Cathedral of the World leads us to a new understanding of both Unitarianism and Universalism. The Cathedral image proclaims Unitarianism – not that there is only one god, but that god is one, and god is the light which shines through each of us in different ways. But more importantly it recognizes the ways in which peoples of all times and places, all ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations, have something to tell the rest of humankind about the light. This is Universalism – the notion that all people are worthy, all people are welcome, and all people with their various beliefs and traditions are needed to make our lives whole.

The challenge of Universalism to traditional theism is fairly obvious: if there are many windows then there are many ways of understanding god. What Universalism proposes instead is a renewed sense of awe and humility in the presence of a god we can never fully comprehend. Such a god is made known to us in our most human moments (such as the birth of child, the death of a loved one, and the experience of love), yet we know that it is not the whole truth. In this way can the many truths of the human/divine encounter live in blessed diversity with one another, as even those who reject religious ideology altogether find that they are standing with others at their own window.

This is one of the things I love about being a Unitarian Universalist. Because of I have rejected of the god of theism I can say with absolute confidence and without the slightest shrug that I am an a-theist. And at the same time I can tell you about the very real, very present god that I do, in fact, believe in. Unitarian Universalism helps me understand that the mere negation of theism does not suffice as a foundation for my spiritual life. This is why we affirm our common principles and purposes – and for me, these values are what I call god.

Being able to articulate our theological heritage is vitally important if we are to carry on the work of social justice to which so many of us feel called. Justice making requires us to be in relationship with diverse communities, and we will not get very far in those relationships if our inability to use the common language of faith hinders our ability to welcome and be welcomed by others. I believe that if we can talk about our values, we can talk about god. Even if we find that we have to rely on our internal translators to help us cope with the difficulties we encounter when using the language of faith, we must do so. The values we affirm in this religious community demand as much of us, and thus as I understand it, so does god. Blessed be.