History of God
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
The poet David Whyte has written:
It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
And honestly, I feel the same way. I've never been much to debate and discuss if this conception of God works or if that one is silly. I've rarely even cared enough to ask others about their belief or disbelief in God. Because I'm a minister, I often hear whether I want to or not. More than once I've found myself trapped in a seat on an airplane with someone who, upon learning that I'm a minister, wants to engage me in a conversation about Jesus. Worse, perhaps, is the experience that my friend Stu has when he works in the gay bars in Chicago. Stu wears a clerical collar that identifies him as a minister, and he goes to the bars in Chicago. There he is present to and for the men who populate that nighttime community. He has been physically attacked, he has been spit upon and verbally abused by people whose rage and fury at the institutional church are unlimited and intense. We always assumed that their rage was also directed at a God that they had been told judged them to be an abomination.
The poet says:
It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
And yet, I am confronted again and again with the need to say something about God: do I believe or not, how could I use that language, what does it mean?
In my childhood, I had few if any images of God and no real help in figuring out what that word and concept might be about. I suspect that both my parents would have been appropriately described as agnostics of the same sort that I am: with a mild belief that there likely is something more than we are, and with an unwillingness or inability to name or even describe that something more. God's name was invoked only on two sorts of occasions: when someone was angry and swearing, and at Thanksgiving when my father would pull out the Bible and read to us from the prophet Micah.
Still, with little background about God, and not much interest in exploring it, Karen Armstrong's book A History of God got my interest. It was positively reviewed in all sorts of places, and colleagues, too, recommended it as a worthy, if somewhat difficult, read. When I read the book, I was immediately taken. In the introduction to the book, Armstrong described her own journey of discovery with God. Raised a Roman Catholic, and having joined an order for some time, she eventually left the church, but continued to be drawn to the study of religion and finally to looking at the history of the ideas about God.
"I like the way she thinks," I told friends about her writing. What that means is that she and I agree on much. I liked and found comfortable her pragmatism in her study of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Listen to this:
[T]he statement "I believe in God" has no objective meaning as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word "God"; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive.
Ideas about God have changed over the centuries since monotheism began to dominate the western world. From the days of tribal deities, to the influence of the Greeks, to the political genius of Muhammad, to the ecstatic vision of the Jewish mystics to Luther to Nietzsche, to the scientists and the philosophers, almost everyone has had differing vision of God. The inspiration is different for each of them, and the lives that they encourage and support are as different, too.
Today's agenda is to talk in all too brief a way about some of the images of God that inform us and inform our recent past.
First, though, I want to lay out some of the biases that I bring to this enterprise. As I said, God and I aren't really on a first name basis. And my glimpses of something that I could call God are fleeting at best. Still, I believe, as does Karen Armstrong, that there is something -- a reality, a power, a force -- that through the ages people have experienced and named God. Though the descriptions and stories have shown us differing views and visions of that power or force or reality, it seems undeniable that human beings experience some sort of transcendence, and then grope for words to describe that experience. Philosophers have sought to make sensible and logical the ways in which we think about God. Mystics have fallen to their knees in prayer and spoken in image and dream. Many of the rest of us find those snatches and glimpses of whatever that is, and sometimes have forgotten it, sometimes have dismissed it, sometimes have rested in awed silence in the face of it.
A friend once passed along a taped radio show in which a scientist described the physiological foundations for the experience of otherness that seems to be found in all ages and in all cultures. It was a fascinating interview with this researcher who was looking to see what it is that creates that experience: what goes on in our brain chemistry when we suddenly feel some sort of presence, something more, something other. He discovered that certain sorts of electromagnetic fields could produce that experience of otherness or transcendence. God, he claimed, was a matter of those experiences which are then named by our culture as transcendent and divine. It mattered very much, he went on to say, what those cultural messages are, what we are bid to do in light of that experience of experience that we name transcendence, the divine, God.
This is my bias: no matter the cause -- electrochemical changes in the brain and the fluids that suspend it in our skulls, a power or force that is made known to us by mystical experience, whatever and however we might have the experience of that something greater than, something transcendent, something beyond words -- no matter the cause, there is an experience that many through the ages have named God. Further, what matters isn't if we can prove it in some sort of empirical study or if we can align it with logical precepts. What matters is what kind of life and action within the world that experience demands of us. What matters is the ways in which we live with that experience, what it tells us about the world and our place within it.
And the second bias that I bring to this is the bias of the mystic: that our language does not serve us well if we come about God as a noun among other nouns, as if that word points toward some concrete being, some reality that we have the power to name. We are better served by looking to poetry and story, to image and vision to expand our understanding. That's partly why I included Denise Levertov's poem in our readings this morning. I shuddered with recognition the first time I read that poem because it described for me an experience that I've had over and over. When there seems to be nothing solid left in my life, when everything has turned to mud and loss and destruction -- you know those times, too, I suspect -- when I have reached for something to hold, my hand has slipped. Her words speak what I have known:
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember,
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
I cannot find God in reason, in logical discourse, but only in that sort of image, only touching on that sort of experience.
Throughout the history of this idea of a single god, people have sought to tie it up, to make it a neat package that can be easily understood. In order to speak of that experience, and in order to teach others how to tune themselves to find that experience, human beings have sought to make God into something that we can grasp and understand. We hear the messages today from the television preachers, we hear it from the radical religious right, that somehow there is one God, one image, one picture, one truth that cannot be denied and cannot be changed.
It is nothing new, truly, for throughout the ages there has been an ongoing struggle between those who took God as a literal and objective fact of one sort or another and those who sought to point toward an experience of what they named transcendence, what they named divine, what they named God. They sought to explore the subjective and interior experiences, not the literal, objective, rational, and logical. Both of these dynamics are found in Christianity, in Judaism and in Islam. Likely they are found in all religious traditions.
A second feature of all these religions that is worth remarking upon is the part played by compassion in all these religions. Armstrong notes:
The prophets [of Judaism] . . . discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions formed in the Axial Age. The new ideologies that were developing . . . during this period all insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. It was no longer sufficient to confine observance to the Temple and to the extra temporal world of myth. After enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and practice compassion for all living beings.
In Judaism and in Islam, at least initially, the emphasis and focus was not on orthodoxy, that is right belief, but it was instead focused on orthopraxy, right practice. Christianity seems to have almost from the start struggled with the notion of right beliefs, though in the early days of the Christian community, the point wasn't to say the right words, but to cultivate the right relationship. (I must indulge a quick aside here: What we call creeds today are not what the early Christians thought of as creeds. The first creed wasn't accepted as definitive until 325. Armstrong notes that when Christians "recited their 'creeds,' they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dere: to give one's heart. When they said "credo". . . this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position.")
The struggles both to maintain God as something beyond our understanding and comprehension and yet something intimately connected to our lives, as well as the movement toward faith embodied in acts of compassion can speak to us today.
More times than I can tell you, I've talked with people who tell me that they can no longer accept the God of their childhood. A male god who is in charge of everything, some super-being who controls and directs all of what happens on earth, and who measures out judgement, admitting some to a celestial realm, and casting the rest into a lake of fire. I was even known to say things such as "I could never worship a God who would allow children to starve, who, though powerful, will not intervene on behalf of the powerless and fragile." With an image and vision of God that is firmly grounded in the literal and concrete, it is reasonable for most of us to dismiss and discard it as unbelievable and unworthy.
And once that's been done, the word itself becomes a problem. Whenever it is used, we cringe, sure that the image that is being addressed is that old white guy in the clouds, the stern judging God who has let his people know what's what through the holy scriptures. Conversation becomes impossible.
What I would like to suggest is that we take the side of those who have through the ages sought to keep God out of the hands of those who would make of that word a male tyrant, fully defined and understood. I would suggest that we take God back. Not the old guy in the clouds, not a super-being, not the judge and jury for our wrong acts, but the God that Denise Levertov found upholding her.
In a world where God’s will seems to be claimed by conflicting people, we need to be able to articulate and explore what that means, to understand how it might be connected to our own experiences, and what it might mean. We must be able to challenge those who would confine God to a sect or one particular -- and often nasty -- idea. For it is true, too, that through the ages people have been led to compassionate living, led to act on behalf of the poor and powerless. It is important both as an area of spiritual exploration and important as an area of discourse in the wider public.
It is likely true that I will always tend away from discussions of God. In the end, I suspect that I will come back to the words of the poet, David Whyte:
It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
What counts finally isn't the images and ideas, but the life that we are led into: called into compassion, I hope, called to a life that trusts that we shall be upheld. What counts isn't how we pray or don't pray, what name we call upon in our hour of greatest terror and pain. What counts is the life we live, how we are called into being the best that we can, called to live with intention and kindness and care.