Images of God
(Second in a month-long sermon series on "God")

Over the summer and into the fall I've been engaged in one of my favorite past-times, I've been watching the television and reading the paper, scanning all of my usual websites - keeping an eye open for news about God. It may seem like a funny thing to do, I know - looking around here, and especially there - for news about God, and I must admit that things were fairly quiet for a while - with only the occasional story of this or that clergy person claiming God's voice and speaking out for or against the war in Iraq - but in the past few weeks things have picked up quite a bit, and everywhere I turn, it seems, someone is claiming God's hand in either their rescue from or the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Just one day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall - a religiously based anti-choice group claimed that a satellite image of the hurricane bore an un-canny resemblance to the shape of a six-week old fetus. Obviously, the group proclaimed, God had chosen to punish Louisiana - and especially New Orleans - for allowing legal abortions.

Another religiously based group, Repent America, found reason to celebrate amidst the devastation as well. The hurricane, you see, had prevented a particular event known as Southern Decadence - an event that typically draws tens of thousands of gay and lesbian people to New Orleans - from taking place. Again, God had stepped in to protect us from the evil in our midst.

Representative Richard Baker of Louisiana, saw God's hand in the hurricane as well. The Wall Street Journal reports that, although Baker now denies it, this representative from Louisiana quipped, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."[1]

A punishing god, an angry god, a god who just happens to hate all the same people that you do - that was the God who managed to make it on the news. I believe that God probably showed up for other people in other ways as well - perhaps in the hand outstretched, the air-conditioned bus, the solace and comfort offered - but this God got far less air-time - and the God who physically does nothing, the God who does not tangibly intervene by stopping the rain and drying up the land - well that God was invoked only in anger, only in loneliness.

In a country where recent polls show that 91% of the population believes in god or some kind of higher power - I simply cannot imagine that this angry, absent, punishing personal god - is all that there is, and I simply cannot stomach the idea of ceding such a powerful metaphor for life and for justice - the idea and the experience of God - to the side of hatred.

And so I stand with Unitarian prophet Ralph Waldo Emerson - ready to bring both my experiences and my intellect to the table - believing that it is, as he wrote, only "When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence."[2] Only when we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric that God my truly fire the heart with its presence.

For myself, and for many of us, I believe - breaking the god of tradition may be the easiest part of this proposition. The god of tradition that Emerson refers to - the god of classical theism - the god invoked by those who made the news after the hurricane - the unmoved mover, the tempest filled judge, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good - for many of us, this god of tradition lies already broken, broken at the feet of our experiences. Each one of us, I believe, has faced or will face some situation in our lives that simply does not make sense if a god like this exists - some moment or experience when someone we care for - or we ourselves - must cope with a devastating illness, tragedy, or loss - some situation where it is clear that the pain is not, could not, possibly be deserved as some kind of cosmic punishment - situations when we might naturally believe that if this all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good god exists, how could it possibly not intervene?

Granting even the possibility that this traditional understanding of God implicitly knows more than we can ever know - this god of tradition often rings hollow in the face of adversity - leaving us either to discard God all together or to believe that we somehow deserve the pain we are given. This god of tradition lies broken at many of our feet - and it continues to do damage to so many - because it stands by negligent and unmoved in the face of injustice and tragedy - because it allows the voice of evil to invoke its name - because its very existence rings hollow in many of our lives.

For many of us, the god of tradition lies easily broken - it is the second half of Emerson's admonition, rather, that I believe presents a far more difficult challenge. For many of us, while we may easily shed the god of tradition, ceasing from our god of rhetoric can be a whole other story.

As religious liberals, we have long valued and I hope we will long continue to value the use of our minds as well as the use of our hearts and hands in matters of faith. Like Emerson, and so many who have gone before and come after him - we Unitarian Universalists test our beliefs not against a uniform creed for all, but against our individual life experiences, against our intellect, our conscience, and our reason. We are called, over and over again, to engage our minds in our understanding of God and the holy - and at times, as Emerson understood even in his own day, we may be tempted to go too far - surrendering the total of our spiritual life to the mind - neglecting the other parts of us that make us human - that make us wonderful - that allow God to truly fire our hearts with its presence. In these moments, when engaging our god of rhetoric takes center stage - I am reminded of the words of Albert Einstein - an intellectual genius, of course, of the 20th century. "We should take care not to make the intellect our god;" he reminds us, "it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."

So how do we - as my colleague Richard Kellway says - move beyond the word into the experience? How do we, as Kaaren suggested last week - get over ourselves a bit - moving beyond the search for the right description of a supreme being and into instead the state of being we seek? How do we, as religious liberals, experience the god that can truly fire our hearts with its presence, transforming us - as theologian Henry Nelson Wieman writes - as we cannot transform ourselves?

We can begin, first, by pledging - at least for the time that we sit here in church - to resign from the debating society when it comes to matters of God. When I say that we might resign from the debating society - I am not asking you to leave your mind at the door - I am asking you, rather, to refrain from hostile probing and mental jousting, relying instead on the spirit of curiosity when you encounter beliefs different from your own. There is always, I believe, inadequacy in argument over ultimate things and even the strongest logical proof for or against may ring hollow in the face of experience. It matters not whether we can convince one another of our experiences, it matters only that we address the questions and the doubts that are our own.

Second, I invite us to use not only our intellect but also our imagination and our emotion as we explore the concept of a non-traditional personal god. As seasoned religious humanist, John Dietrich, once wrote - "God must be felt and experienced, rather than thought of and reasoned about. One's whole being is involved here, not the intellect alone. Out of this feeling and experience, an intimate, inward, personal relationship emerges."3 Out of feeling and experience, an intimate, inward, personal relationship can emerge.

A personal relationship with God. What might this mean for us as religious liberals? I cannot speak for everyone of course, nor do I wish for you to adopt my beliefs, but I can tell you, that I call my God personal not because it acts directly in my life - but because it exists in relationship with me and I with it, calling me over and over to my better self - to wholeness, to life, to the building of communities of justice in this world. It is a God that does not disappear, a God who sits in the next seat, its shoulder pressed against mine, the breath within my breath even when I am filled with confusion, with rage, with disappointment. It is a God that holds hope for me when I cannot see it myself. It is a God that is with me even when I feel alone - even when I cry out as the character from our reading did this morning - longing for answers, for direct contact and words, reminding me that I am connected not only to God but through God to all of the world as well.

When we long not only to describe but also to experience this personal god - to feel our hearts filled with the fire that Emerson describes - to know the god who can live and move within, beyond, and among us - inspiring us to wholeness, to life, to justice - I have found it most helpful to turn to the relationships we share with one another. It is in these relationships, I believe, that we feel most deeply, and that we find ourselves most transformed. It is from these relationships that I draw my understanding of God.

Much has been written about traditional understandings of God the judge, the protector, and the disciplinarian. And much has also been written and spoken about God the parent, the lover, and the friend.[4] In each of these more radical models of God, love plays a central role.

When we imagine God as a parent - we can imagine the kind of love that wills life into being and hopefully says to us over and over again, "It is good that you exist!" In this kind of relationship, God's love for us is unconditional, standing with us and for us simply because we exist in the world.

When we imagine God as a lover - we may first want to avert our eyes, but this kind of description and relationship with the holy spans the centuries. Medieval mystics, authors of the Song of Songs, and so many others have compared their relationship to God with this complex human relationship. When we are in love with someone - we love them because they are exactly who they are - they are precious to us for no reason and beyond all reason. When we imagine that God might love us exactly as we are - we know that we exist as loveable, valuable people, complete with our own inherent worth and dignity.

When we imagine God as a friend, we understand that relationship not as wholly necessary - but rather as wholly enjoyable. Entered into freely, the relationship of friendship consists of affection and respect, mutual trust and delight, and offers both joy and sustenance. As C.S. Lewis wrote, friendship "is one of those things that give value to survival."[5] As one of those things that gives value to survival - a relationship with god modeled on friendship- entered into freely - can be the kind of relationship that offers a sense not only of meaning, but of joy in life as well.

From these three images of god - parent, lover, and friend - we might draw the powerful experiences of unconditional love, complete love that recognizes our worth and dignity just as we are, and a love that offers both joy and meaning as well - but to these three images of a personal God - I'd like to add one more - a model that has been particularly useful to me in my own life - the model of god as teacher.

When I imagine God as a teacher - I see there the many mentors and guides who have filled my life - the people and institutions who have lifted me up - holding me steadily in their unconditional love and regard - seeing the possibility and potential in me - and offering me their hopeful expectancy. For me, this is the god of Ramadan, the god of Yom Kippur, the god of forgiveness and hope who never loses me in its sight, but encourages me always to try again, trusting that in time and with effort I will live more and more from the deep well of love that is given to me. I know this kind of god in the people whom I've gotten to know in their life and in their death - people like our very own John Howland and Warren Benson - people who offer an encouraging word and hold us in their unwavering gaze, expecting nothing short of the best from us. The power of this kind of god rests for me, in being seen, in being known, and in being held in hope.

When we bring these experiences of God together - the variety of possible personal relationships - we discover at least one common feature, and that is love. It is a concept as old as time - and that is a God of love. Love that delights in our existence, love that heals and transforms us, love that offers us a sense of meaning and value in our lives, love that holds us in its steady gaze of hopeful expectation. This kind of love, the love that will not let us go, the love that stands with us unconditionally, the power that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves alone, the love that demands nothing in return is agape love - the kind of love that leaders of justice such as Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked to sustain himself and so many others through the brutality and seemingly slow progress of the civil rights movement.

In building the beloved community, Dr. King demanded that his followers offer love, not hatred to those who would seek to harm or slow them. As Dr. King describes, "Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate; it means understanding, redeeming good will for men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return...when we love on the agape level we love [people] not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them."[6] And we trust, as Dr. King did, and as our Universalist ancestors did before him, that no one stands outside the circle of god's love, that the power of love can and will turn people away from hatred, will transform the world and lead toward justice. The spirit of nonviolence that so many have taught - the spirit of change for the better flows from this radical kind of love - agape love - the love of a parent, a lover, a friend, a teacher - and we find in choosing to love rather than to hate those who oppress us and others - that we hold ourselves to the highest standard, doing no spiritual damage as we stand for justice, creating ourselves in the image of the god of love we have chosen, and offering to all those in the world the gift of practical compassion.

As we explore the possibilities of faith together in this community, may we open our hearts and our minds to the love which transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves - whether it comes from without or within - from God or nature, animals or people, opening ourselves to the reliable, trustworthy love that will not let us go, but that fires our hearts with its presence, calling us toward wholeness, toward life, and toward the creation of communities of justice.

May it be so, and Amen.

Jen Crow, Associate Minister
October 9, 2005

1. Christian Century, "Century Marks," October 4, 2005, 7.
2. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Emerson (Penguin Books: New York, 1981), 224.
3. Tom Owen-Towle, Wrestling with God: A Unitarian Universalist Guide for Skeptics and Believers (Barking Rocks Press: San Diego, CA: 2002), 98.
4. Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; 1987).
5. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.; 1960), 103.
6. James M. Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco; 1986), 8-9.