Comedian Dick Van Dyke once reported the story of a mother in Bartonville, Illinois, who told him that one day her daughter was busy painting a portrait that she claimed was of God. When her mother pointed out that nobody knows what God looks like, the girl said, "They will when I'm finished."[1]
I'd like this to be that kind of sermon, so you would know for sure about God. But it won't. In fact, I will argue that it is theologically more exciting not to know for sure than to think we know for certain - that the question of whether one believes in God or not is in itself questionable.
Unitarian Universalists, because of our unorthodox views, have sometimes been accused of being "allergic" to God - that in our churches God needs a "welcoming congregation," a play on our Welcoming Congregation program which encourages human diversity in our churches. Many of us tend not to use the word because either it is not part of our theological vocabulary or because we are afraid use of it will be misinterpreted. But, like it or not, God is an inescapable word - some would even say that God is inescapable.
When I think of Unitarian Universalists and God I think of the story of two young boys who were always in trouble at church. On Sunday morning one of them heard the minister ask from the pulpit with great solemnity: "Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?" The boy ran home terrified and hid in the attic until his brother found him. "We're in trouble," he said, breathlessly, "God's missing and they think we did it!"
This morning I'd like to explore the God question autobiographically, in hopes it may facilitate your exploration. Let me tell you about the life and death and rebirth of God in me. I grew up Universalist when Universalists had a simple definition of deity: God is love. While God was not graphically depicted, I recall having a sense that He (God was always "He" as in "Our Father who art in Heaven") looked a bit like Jesus, but with white hair. This was a totally benign God in my almost totally benign childhood. Our gods are reflected powerfully in our personal experience.
As I matured, God came to have more to do with natural beauty than with a human face. Privileged to live in the beautiful Bristol Hills, it was easy for me to imagine God as the great cosmic artist - spilling the divine palate on those hills of home. This was God, not the Father, so much as God the Creator.
My experiences of God were rather intense in those days. I felt literally called to the ministry in the summer of 1951 and preached my first sermon at 14 that fall while working for the Boy Scout God and Country Award. These were heady experiences, however much one can understand them as products of adolescent naivete. And so, here I am some 50 years later, never having faltered in my desire to be a minister.
As a teen-age preacher in my own and neighboring churches, I had a profound sense of the divine in my life. One of my preaching venues was the Universalist Church in Macedon, where a tiny congregation, the youngest of whom was old enough to be my parent, listened politely to a brush-cut young man expounding life's eternal verities. There were times when I was so overcome by my mission that I had to stop the car by the side of the road to wipe the tears from my eyes.
This was the Richard Gilbert of piety, a youthful zealot this congregation could never imagine. As I had decided on the ministry at the tender age of 14, I carried my presumed profession over into my youthful athletic endeavors. I can't quite recall how it happened, but I was not only the quarterback for my high school football team, but also their chaplain.
I led the Lord's Prayer before games and even prayed in the huddle - never for victory, you understand, but for strength. That was long before I understood the separation of church and state, long before I understood the presumed piety of today's professional Athletes for Christ, long before I realized how such devotions tend to trivialize deity. But I was young and foolish and very pious.
It was in college that this piety came under serious intellectual scrutiny. Philosophy 110 at St. Lawrence University introduced me to comparative religions, to Bible study and to an ethical relativism that shook my very orderly worldview. I began to understand the fundamental differences in religions and people, to appreciate the power of doubt and to realize that my religious faith needed to be deepened by study and reflection.
Ironically, it was in theological school that I became - for a time - an atheist. Perhaps it wasn't true atheism - an active rejection of God's existence. It was more agnosticism - I doubted that existence so strongly that I was quite sure God was just a figment of the human imagination. I found common cause with the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who near the end of his life wrote: "As for the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not. Life is too short for such difficult enquiries."
Happily I was matriculating in a Unitarian Universalist seminary, St. Lawrence Theological School, where such skepticism was not only accepted, but encouraged. Seminary was not where I finally got my theology together; it was merely a stop along the way. I found it just a tad exciting, if not a bit frightening, to think of preaching in a church without benefit of God.
But my intellectual quest was deepened when I realized the wisdom of the great German theologian Paul Tillich, whose incredibly intricate, not to say often boring, Systematic Theology was our text in a constructive theology class. Tillich, in one of his better moments, had written, "You must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself."[2] I was a religious humanist.
The 1960's in which I began my ministry was a time of rampant liberalism - both theological and political. As an avid champion of the social gospel I did not much worry about my heretical faith when I became Assistant Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland. That is, I did not worry until one day when I visited an elderly woman in the church whose husband had just died. As I prepared to express my humanistic sympathy, she asked me to pray with her - and so, somewhat taken aback - I did the best I could - sending hopefully healing words into the silent emptiness. But God was very real to this grieving woman, and so the issue re-entered my consciousness in a most troubling way. Perhaps there were healing powers in the universe I had not yet tapped.
My engagement in the civil rights movement brought me face to face with real suffering, terrible tragedy and towering triumph - for which my agnostic humanism had not fully prepared me. A ministerial friend was killed as he prostrated himself under a bulldozer during an integration rally at a school construction site in Cleveland. I had been too busy with administrative chores to attend. I regretted my inaction, wallowed in guilt and marveled at his God-inspired courage to give up his life for justice.
Hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington and again at James Reeb's 1965 memorial service in Selma, Alabama, revealed to me the power of the God of Justice. My theological horizons widened as I began to understand the divine as part of an historic process of justice-making. My early God of Nature had, in a way, merged with this intimation of a God of Justice. God was a "basic source of unrest in the world."[3]
Since our movement is known for its intellectualism, reason was always a factor in my God-or non-God consciousness. I had admired Thomas Jefferson's deism - a clock-maker God who created the earth and flung it into the heavens to let it spin, leaving its fate to humankind. This "rather chilly divine architect" had appeal for one who found science and religion not as enemies, but as complementary vantage points for understanding Ultimate Reality.
I recall an evening in Gunnison Chapel at St. Lawrence University when I met the great Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley at his lecture on science and religion. The stars have always held a fascination for me - they were so clear at night in the Bristol Hills and the Finger Lakes where I grew up. I came to think that the truly great scientists were on to something the theologians had missed - the awesome wonder of Creation. Shapley was once asked to define God in ten words. He said, "All Nature is God and all God is Nature." His questioner said, "That's only nine." Then Shapley, without missing a beat, said "Amen."
As my ministry evolved, I became more and more conscious of the tragic in human life. Why did good people die prematurely? Why did the evil often flourish? Why is there so much injustice in the world? Why do our best endeavors often fail? Clearly there is no benevolent God in control of the human predicament. I began to find the God of Job to be a most intriguing and appealing character. Interestingly, the voice of God out of the whirlwind in Job is the last time God actually speaks in either the Hebrew or the Christian scriptures. Job complains bitterly of his suffering, and questions the morality of God.
"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements - surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang together and all the children of God shouted for joy?'"[4]
That's the kind of God that puts us in our place. We realize we are not God, and we are not in total control of our lives. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. Get used to it. That's the way things are. I began to understand God through existentialist Albert Camus: we human beings are left "without appeal," living in "the benign indifference of the universe."
And so, inspired by my personal experiences of God as a youth, sustained by the glories of nature, sobered by intellectual doubt and chastened by human experience, where am I in my understanding of God? I don't believe in God - as an intellectual proposition. The question "do you believe in God?" - so often asked by those who seek to understand Unitarian Universalists - is really a meaningless question. The question really is "do you agree with my understanding of God?" Until I know that, I cannot answer. And so, when people ask, I am tempted to respond - "How long do you have? That is not an easy question - it is really the invitation to a conversation." Somehow, however, I don't usually feel this is what the questioner has in mind.
No, for me, God is not an intellectual proposition to which one can respond yes or no. Instead of "believing in God," whatever that means, I like to say that I am a person of faith - faith understood as a basic trust in the integrity of reality and the worthwhileness of life. That faith is in a cosmos which is shot through with the divine - the divine meaning signals of transcendence which lead me to understand that I live and move and have my being in a reality greater than I - more than the mind can wrap itself around, more than the soul can penetrate, more than words can express.
These signals of transcendence for me are three: 1) the living earth upon which I am fortunate to live - an interdependent web of existence for which I can only give thanks each and every day. I find deity in the burning bush whose scarlet flames brighten the autumn days, and in the patient grass which waits beneath the snow, and in the pageant of the seasons which eternally come and go.
2) the living tradition in which I am grateful to live - recipient of a beneficence from that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before and left gifts - a plenitude of truth and goodness and beauty. Those prophets of the human spirit - Jesus and Buddha, Jefferson and Anthony, Gandhi and King - remind me what it is to be truly human and therefore part of the divine scheme of things.
3) the synergy of people who come together to worship, to strive for justice, to help one another, to celebrate life. In all this I am convinced that cosmically speaking, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that creation is fundamentally mystery and miracle and that we creatures are the lucky ones. This happens not only Sunday mornings and Friday nights here and in far-flung places we can only imagine; it happens every day as people meet to create something new in the world.
Now, if this is not the neat, tightly wrapped definition of God you had hoped to hear; if this is not the answer to whether or not I believe in God; if this does not help you determine if you believe in God, then I am sorry. It's just that I don't think we grow the human spirit by worrying about definitions, by categorizing people as believers and non-believers, in reducing ultimate mystery to human certitude.
I have found my wrestling with God over the years to be exhilarating, not boring; I have found fascinating the excitement of not knowing the ultimate truth, but in constantly trying to be true to what I have found; I have discovered the experience of the deeper dimensions of living in this sacred time and place to be far more meaningful than worrying about the existence of a divine being.
I use the word "God" sparingly because it is subject to such varied interpretations. As poetry, it is unmatched. It has the power to inspire, to sustain, to comfort. As piety, it is dangerous - there is nothing more dangerous than fanatics doing what they believe is God's will. And so for me God is a natural, not a supernatural process, a Cosmic Creativity that while indifferent to me as an individual, yet is fundamentally benign. God and I do not really converse, but I feel part of a presence that is with me always.
I leave you with a sense of the playfulness with which I approach this mystery of living and being. You know the philosophic conundrum "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" Philosopher George Berkeley argued that existence is based on perception; thus, the tree would not make a sound because sounds are what are heard. Hence the limerick:
"A student once remarked, "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
That this sycamore tree
Simply ceases to be
When there's no one about on the quad."
And the reply:
"In re. what you thought to be odd,
I am always about on the quad
So this sycamore tree
Never ceases to be.
Sincerely, Yours faithfully, God."
Well, you probably don't know any more about God now than when you entered this sanctuary. I haven't painted a picture with the clarity exhibited by that confident little girl of whom Dick Van Dyke wrote. On the other hand, why would I want to spoil the joy of personal discovery? I'm still discovering. Perhaps you are, too.
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