This morning we are here to ask the question, “What do each of us believe about God?” This is the fourth in a six-part series on God- Talk. And it is an opportunity for you to clarify what you believe and why you believe it.
So far in this sermon series, we have concluded that the atheist is a religious person with no invisible means of support, that agnostics dare to doubt, and that mystics are sustained by the Great Mystery of Life. This morning we will explore the belief of theism.
I would like to begin with a cartoon one of our members passed to me. It shows a bespeckled minister in a pulpit telling his congregation: “In compliance with federal full-disclosure laws, I’m required to tell you that I’m really not sure about any of this stuff.”
To be honest, I feel that way whenever I walk into this pulpit, but it’s especially true when I’m talking about God. Of course, I believe it’s healthy not to be sure about any of this theology stuff. I like to think that my role – and your’s as well – is to wrestle with God as Jacob did in the Old Testament and as Marge Piercy does in this poem:
I wrestle the holy name
and know there is no wording finally
can map, constrain or summon that fierce
voice whose long wind lifts my hair
chills my skin and fills my lungs
to bursting. I serve the word
I cannot name, who names me daily,
who speaks me out by whispers and shouts.
For me, any belief in God that has been achieved without struggling and doubting is superficial and is susceptible to being seduced by evil. God by definition is the most difficult concept human beings could conceive, and to pretend that our puny minds can wrap around such a grandiose and mysterious notion is ludicrous. And yet what a challenge to try and do so.
Most of us grew up believing in the kind of God James Weldon Johnson so beautifully describes in his poem:
"And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.”
This majestic God may have given us a sense of security and acceptance, though also weighing us down with mountains of guilt and anxiety. Most of us have shed that image over the years, coming to believe that it was a mask created by humanity to fit over divinity.
In a book called "Stupid Ways, Smart Ways, to Think About God," the authors, Rabbi Jack Bemporad and Michael Shevack, write that "In many ways, we have grown smarter, but when it comes to God, many of us haven't grown at all... We still have stupid ways of thinking about God... They go on to explain some of those "stupid" views of God, some of which are:
"* God is considered your personal 'cosmic bellhop,' ratifying 'your every desire,' always 'ready to serve you' to control others, making your own 'desires god-like,' in essence making 'yourself god.'
"* He's regarded as the 'proverbial God of wrath, ready to show how much he cares by punishing you, the Marquis de God,' despising sinners so much he exterminates them...
"* 'God the general,' a 'nationalistic god' whose 'holy mission is to serve his country. Protect its honor.' He's not just defender, but a 'self-righteous and meddlesome god... He is the commander of crusades. The leader of jihads' to 'purify the Earth of all infidels.'
Our challenge is to rid ourselves of these superficial images of God so we can grow a more imaginative and meaningful concept of divinity. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote at the end of one of his poems:
"Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive."
Our first task then is to let go of the half-gods, those shallow concepts that deplete more than enrich our lives. And then we need to dive down deeper and deeper into the fathomless sea of God.
That’s the approach of Karen Armstrong who wrote the book A History of God. She brings to life the voices and dreams of people throughout the ages who have asked, Who or what is God, or does God exist at all?
Karen Armstrong also speaks of her own journey towards God. She tells of the different gods she has encountered, beginning with the hell, fire, and brimstone one she rejected as a child. Next she moved on to a metaphysical deity and entered into a religious order to better understand this God. But that god too left her in doubt, so much so that she left the order.
Karen Armstrong’s faith in God did eventually return, but it was again a different deity she affirmed. She came to recognize, as she writes, that human beings are spiritual animals. ...Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life...
People certainly do need religion, but we aren’t good at knowing what to do with it. In the words of one writer, “(People) will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.”
In almost every religion people are pulled towards two opposite polarities concerning the divine. First, we are drawn by a deep desire to relate to a universal presence that inspires a sense of awe and mystery at the grandeur of life, but not to define that presence too precisely for fear of it becoming an icon or idol. The other primal urge is to be able to wrap our arms and minds around what we call God, to have a name to speak, a face to see, a voice to hear, and an entity to embrace.
God was invented out of this creative tension. When I say God was invented, I don’t mean that God is not real. Rather, humanity has invented masks to conveniently fit over divinity, masks that serve our specific needs and desires.
Our tasks as human beings is to try to look beneath the masks to the divine itself. Let me tell you what the divine looks like to me – understanding of course the full disclosure I presented earlier.
First of all, God is, in the words of Paul Tillich, the ultimate reality, which means that when you cut through all the layers of superficiality and illusion, God is at the very heart of life. Tillich, the most renowned Protestant theologian of the 20th century, had the gall to say, "God does not exist."
You can see why the fundamentalists call Tillich an atheist. But Tillich didn’t stop there. He goes on to say: "God does not exist. He is being, beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."
A fascinating argument. Tillich is telling us that all those people who say that they believe in God are the real atheists. Now try that out on your friends.
Tillich uses a number of different images to describe the nature of God, but the most inspiring to me is this one:
"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God,” he writes. “That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the depth of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps," he says, "in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, ... You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever... (Those) who knows about depth know about God."So concludes Paul Tillich. And it is in that depth that we find meaning and purpose in life.
A believable God for me is not only the ultimate reality but one that conveys a sense of mystery and wonder. When we encounter the real God we can’t help but be moved by the awe of mystery.
- God is the mystery of standing on a mountaintop and gazing out on the bountiful earth below.
- God is the mystery of giving birth to a child and nurturing its growth.
- God is the mystery of an old man's dying gasp.
- God is the mystery of creation itself, never-ending, continually unfolding before us and within us.
It was Saint Augustine who once issued a warning to preachers who were driven to preach about God: "If you can understand it," he said, "then it is not God."
I can't tell you how many times in my almost 30 years as a minister that I’ve been asked, "Do you believe in God?" I am always tempted to answer with the words of Voltaire: "To believe in God is impossible-- not to believe in God is absurd."
I do believe that we must get beyond believing or not believing. What we need to talk about is whether we experience God or not.
The God experience is our actual encounter with the divine. When we experience God, we discover that we don't have the words, the images, or even the thoughts to conceive what we've encountered. We realize that every conception of God is limited and inadequate and can even be deceptive.
God is a metaphor, a symbol, a myth, a way to communicate. And yet God is also the experience of transcendence, of being pulled out of ourselves and into a creative, sustaining, mysterious relationship.
An old twelfth century book called "The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers," describes God eloquently in one short sentence -- and this is the best definition I have ever come across for the divine: "God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." Let me repeat that: "God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."
That beautifully describes the ultimate paradox that we cannot comprehend the ultimate reality. As someone has said: "Don't try too hard to pat God on the back or you will find you have missed completely."
Our role is not to comprehend and understand the ultimate reality but to relate to God, and we do that through mystery, awe and wonder. But the mystery is not always a beautiful thing. It also comes to us as a feeling of awesomeness, of being overwhelmed by death, grief, and tragedy, bewildered by a cosmos that dwarfs our being. And yet most of us eventually experience within the mystery a peace that passes all understanding.
A believable God for me is also a growing God. God as process, movement, evolution is more difficult to find in the Jewish-Christian heritage, but it is prominent in Eastern religions. God is that growing, ever-creating part of the universe. God did not create the world in a distant time and then go off on a fishing trip. God is the continual creation of life and the cosmos.
Tierhard de Chardin, the 19th century Catholic theologian, wrote: "God is that evolutionary force that keeps pushing life into more and more ordered forms, into higher and higher consciousness, that motion and movement toward life and love."
Process theology eloquently describes this active, growing God. The two fathers of process theology, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, both promoted their beliefs in the early and mid twentieth century.
Modern process theology is an amalgamation of Christian theology, humanist philosophy, and scientific insights. From Christianity comes the concept of God, the sacred, and holiness; from humanist philosophy comes the faith in the power of humanity to change our world for the better; and from science we gain the insights of the theories of relativity and evolution. But the main ingredient to process theology is human experience: our attempt to cope with suffering and death in a meaningful manner.
Process theology begins with the assumption that the world as we know it is a process, an ongoing event, rather than a collection of objects. All of existence is rushing along in the river of time and space, constantly moving, never stopping. And always in the process of becoming.
Like a river that is the culmination of every stream, creek, and drop of rain that merges with it, each of us is a culmination of every event that has ever taken place in our lives and even before our lives. And God is the ocean in which all of our experiences are merged.
In every moment of your life you are in the process of becoming another person. This is the essence of process theology: life is constantly changing from one form of being to another. Many of those changes we have no control over. But there are others we can control.
In this river of being each of us is drawn irresistibly to choose life over death, joy over pain, and love over hate. Sometimes we make the wrong choice, but even in times of utmost despair there is something inside of us that yearns for life and joy and love.
The nitty-gritty of process theology is that it is creative. Although the force of entropy is pulling all of existence irresistibly towards the void of nothingness, there is another force that is eternally creating an incredible, amazing variety of beings and that urges every being towards evolution and growth.
God is no longer the unseen puppeteer controlling life while remaining aloof from it. We are God. All of us are a part of this new intimate divinity. When we change, God changes. Just as life is growing and evolving, so God is growing and evolving.
Lastly, a believable God for me brings about transformation. Throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures God enters into human lives and changes them for the better.
The Torah tells us that "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Dt. 16.20). And the prophets call the Jewish people back to this fundamental law of Torah: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream" (Amos 5.24)
God’s function is to awaken people to the urgency of our time and the need for radical human and institutional changes. If we are not changed for the better and no genuine struggle for justice takes place, then the God proclaimed is not the true God.
In the words of John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop and closet Unitarian Universalist:
“This God is not a parent who will reward or punish me for my virtues or shortcomings. This God is rather a power, a presence that calls me into responsibility, into adulthood, into self-reliance, into living for others, and into contributing to the well-being of humanity.”
This God of which Bishop Spong speaks is always present to us; we only need to be present to God. We need to be open to being transformed by the ultimate reality. We need to open our eyes for the divine in all that we do, exploring within us and around us, in each movement and moment, in every sunrise and sunset, the intricate strands of the vast and beautiful tapestry called God.
There is no place we find God more alive than in the love that transforms and enlivens us. Love is that power that binds us one to the other, that pulls us magnetically towards other souls. When we say God is love, what we're really saying is that God is the unity, the oneness, that we all create through our love. Without love there can no God.
This is what a believable God looks like to me:
- God is the most real of all realities, the very heart of life where truth resides;
- God is the awe-filled mystery of creation that continually unfolds the cosmos;
- God is the never-ending process of growth and evolution that sweeps us through the river of time into new possibilities;
- and God is the transforming power of love that sustains and changes us into more compassionate individuals.
Let us welcome theists into our congregation. Let this be a place to explore the many faces of God and to support each other in experiencing the divine. And let us rid ourselves of half-gods, opening our hearts and minds instead to the one universal living God whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
