Roots…

What’s God Got To Do With It?

Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

September 17, 2006

The word “God” is often a great source of controversy in Unitarian Universalist congregations. There are usually those who would like to hear more use of the word and others who would like to hear less. I remember some years ago, soon after Deedee & I joined the Unitarian Society in Ridgewood, NJ, a famously humanist congregation, the president of the board reproved a visiting minister and his wife by noting, somewhat caustically, that “here we spell the word ‘God’ with two ‘o’s and ‘devil’ without the ‘d.’” The current minister, Sarah Lammert, who will be preaching at our Ordination/ Installation on October 1^st, once preached a sermon about the words she wasn’t allowed to use from the pulpit, including “church,” “God,” and “Jesus.” Over the years when I preached there periodically as I was going through seminary I found myself very carefully qualifying the word “God” whenever I used it from the pulpit. Somehow, that word in particular seemed to arouse allergies many of our members had acquired over the years either in that congregation or in the faith traditions from which they had come. At the same time, I have found myself increasingly comfortable with and even compelled to use the word, so it would probably be well if I provided some insight about how I understand the word and expect to use it from this pulpit.

The problem of God has vexed the finest minds for some centuries; the books I alone have in my library touching on the topic would surely stack higher than this pulpit! So it would be unlikely that I could do more than start a conversation on a narrow aspect of the concept of “God.” Perhaps it will be possible to open some doorways and enable us together to use the word without embarrassment. As Buber reminds us in our reading this morning, “We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”

We start with a limitation of how we can speak of God. The second commandment says “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,” [Exodus 20:4] and in Jewish tradition (as in Islamic tradition) that has meant a rigorous refusal to give any specific form to a representation of God. Even the personal name of God was taken to represent a potential ‘idol,’ and so the letters representing God’s personal name, “YHWH” in the Hebrew, were never pronounced in reading the text but were replaced with the word “Adonai,” or “Lord,” instead. Christian translators initially misunderstood the combination of letters and translated the name as “Jehovah,” a form familiar from the King James Version but no longer used in translations of the Bible except by Jehovah’s Witnesses. God identifies himself to Moses by the name “I AM WHO I AM.” God instructed Moses to tell the children of Israel in Egypt, “I AM has sent me to you.” [Exodus 3:14-15] You can imagine the problems Moses might have had trying to explain to the skeptics among his people that the God he represented was “I AM,” when they were accustomed to gods having proper nouns for names rather than verbs! One could imagine some ironist challenging Moses and saying, “Isis, or Ra, those are proper god names! What’s this nonsense about the present tense of the verb ‘to be’?” At the same time, the name “I AM” was also a profound breakthrough in the possibility for understanding God. Here was a God of action, of being; and indeed it was the action of bringing the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt that created the Jewish people, and that is remembered to this day each Passover.

Other traditions have wrestled with the idea of God in different ways. The Buddha famously told his disciples not to engage in idle speculation about gods and life after death since these things were unknowable and a distraction from the task of overcoming suffering in this world; but many of his followers have treated him and other bodhisattvas as divinities, and in some variants of Buddhism there is a plethora of gods and goddesses. The Hindu tradition includes many gods & goddesses, but it is also understood that these are all manifestations of Brahman, the sacred power which is the inner meaning of all existence. The ways of Confucius, like the teachings of the Buddha, are centered on this life rather than on the realm of the gods, and refer only occasionally to the notion of Heaven, primarily in the role of sanctifying the human order on earth. Islam recognizes one and only one God, Allah, but refers to God as having 99 names representing different aspects of God’s nature, such as Ar-Rahman, The All Beneficent, Al-Quddus, The Most Holy, and Al-Muquit, The Nourisher.

Jesus brings a very personal experience with his understanding of God, referring to God as “Father” or even as “Abba,” Aramaic which is perhaps akin to our “Daddy.” This way of understanding God, unlike much of what we find in the Hebrew Bible, is of an intimate and loving parent. This was the way of perceiving God favored by our own William Ellery Channing, who says “[To be a father is] to communicate one’s own nature, to give life to kindred beings; and the highest function of a Father is to educate the mind of the child, and to impart to it what is noblest and happiest in his own mind.”[1] This is the image of God we call to mind when we join in saying the Prayer of Jesus, “Our Father, which art in heaven…” But this, too, is a particular image of God, an analogy, a way of conceiving, of pointing toward a mystery which cannot be clothed in any particular image or likeness. What might this image convey to a daughter who has been abused by her father, or a child who was abandoned by a father’s death or desertion? And how is it that God must be a man? Might not a mother share the same high qualities and be equally seen as a representative of God’s loving care for us? Recall that the story of creation told in Genesis says that “God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female God created them.” [Genesis 1:27] So God’s image is equally represented in men and women, and not exclusively in men. Hence we might better address God as “Father/Mother,” as did Theodore Parker from our tradition 150 years ago.

Let’s take this a little more personally. Where did my image of God arise from? Our first ideas as children arise within our families, where parents have some of the love and power that in turn is attributed to God. Indeed, as we grow older and our parents come to seem less loving and less all-powerful, God can become a sort of super-parent who transcends those human frailties. And then, at a certain age, so many of us come to feel deeply estranged from this parent-derived image of God. Is it possible that such an estrangement results in part from our failure to expand our concept of what God might be from a time in our lives long left behind us?

God is also sometimes presented as a punitive figure, an all-powerful cop who sees everything we do and keeps a careful record to determine whether we shall be punished or rewarded for eternity. It was this crude, angry image of God which our Unitarian and Universalist forebears set out to correct when they taught that God is Love rather than an angry, vengeful Father who demands our complete, fawning submission. It was for this reason that William Ellery Channing regarded our task in this life as achieving Likeness to God rather than quavering before God. “True religion,” he says, “consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being…. Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn men’s aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes it a bright image of God.”[2]

I was listening to a report on the BBC from a village in Lebanon during the recent war with someone who was being interviewed just after the apartment building in which he lived and to which he was returning was destroyed by a bomb. He had been delayed in returning because his sister asked him to do an errand for her, and the reporter said, “You must be very grateful to your sister.” “No,” replied the man, “I am grateful to Allah for my life.” “But surely your sister deserves some credit?” “No, I am only grateful to Allah.” I was struck by the extraordinary certainty that life itself is a gift of God!

When Bill Clinton visited an AIDS clinic in Rwanda earlier this year, he met some patients who wanted to tell them their stories.

Speaking Kinyarwanda, a woman named Solange described how she and her husband, both suffering from AIDS symptoms, sold their land in order to get treatment. She was brought to the hospital in a coma in February, and her husband died soon afterward. She began drug treatments in May. Her recovery, she said, "thanks to God," has been "unbelievable." "How do you feel now?" Kagame asked her.

"I feel strong," she said. Then she sang a traditional Rwandan song: "If it weren't for the power of the Almighty, I would die." When she stopped singing, she began to cry as she thanked Clinton and the doctors for helping to save her life.[3]

Solange is completely grateful to the doctors who provided her care, but she credits the fact that she is alive to the power of the Almighty. What would it mean to be grateful in this way both to the doctors whom we would regard as the proximate cause of her being alive but beyond that to the Almighty as well?

Solange chooses a song to express her gratitude to the Almighty; sometimes the poets help to express this sense of relationship to God best. For example, here’s one from

Rumi, the ecstatic 13^th Century Sufi poet from Persia:

The wonder of water moving over that rock in the stream

justifies existence.

The swish of a horse's tail—again I am stunned

by the grandeur of the unseen One

that governs all

movement.

I resist looking at the palms of my hands sometimes.

Have you ever gotten breathless before a beautiful face,

for I see you there,

my dear.

There is a wonderful problem waiting for you

that God and I share:

how to keep from fainting when we

see each other.

In truth:

how does God keep from fainting

looking at Himself all day?

Light is moving like a stream, and

the myriad celestial beings

applaud.[4]

Well, so there are naïve people in the world. What does that prove? Only that gratitude may be extended those who are directly helping us as well as to some power within them and beyond all of us that bids them help us and provides the ultimate means.

We would have proof like a scientist can show us, though. We would like to have some ironclad way of knowing for sure that there is a God and that God in some way can respond to us and our needs. Of course, if we define science as consisting of a set of rules which can prove or disprove the material characteristics of the universe, it will hardly do to claim that these material characteristics of reality are the only ones that matter because those are the only ones we can investigate. On the other hand, if all of reality—including our own decisions as human beings—could be captured by some all-encompassing scientific theory, what freedom would we have to act in the world?

There was a time when it seemed as though all of scientific progress militated against the possibility of belief in God. The new cosmology of Galileo dethroned the earth as the center of the universe, Darwin’s theory of Evolution seemed to reduce humankind to a nearly accidental relative of animals and Freud’s science of psychoanalysis proved we couldn’t govern our own minds. More recently science, and particularly cosmology, has proven more open to the possibility that science does not and cannot disprove the reality of God. Paul Davies, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide speaks of one dimension of this mystery when he describes the Anthropic Principle:

A long list of additional "lucky accidents" and "coincidences" has been compiled since [the astronomer Fred Hoyle’s work on carbon], most notably by the astrophysicists Brandon Carter, Bernard Carr, and Martin Rees. Taken together, they provide impressive evidence that life as we know it depends very sensitively on the form of the laws of physics, and on some seemingly fortuitous accidents in the actual values that nature has chosen for various particle masses, force strengths, and so on…. Suffice it to say that, if we could play God, and select values for these quantities at whim by twiddling a set of knobs, we would find that almost all knob settings would render the universe uninhabitable. In some cases it seems as if the different knobs have to be fine-tuned to enormous precision if the universe is to be such that life will flourish.[5]

Perhaps science, then, need not be seen as so completely hostile to the possibility of God. More than that, science is a particular way of knowing in the world, a way of manipulating nature to our will. The results of our use of science have been both positive and negative as we have created better living conditions but also unleashed the possibility of annihilation at our own hands on a worldwide scale. Science does not provide the values by which we deploy the results of science, only the means to manipulate this material world. When it comes to our personal lives, to falling in love or the ecstasy of having a baby, what thought have we then for science? For those parts of our lives, as indeed for the deepest matters of the spirit, poetry is a more effective vehicle of expression than science. Perhaps this, from St. Francis of Assisi

Dear God, please reveal to us

your sublime

beauty

that is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere,

so that we will never again

feel frightened.

My divine love, my love,

please let us touch

your face.[6]

There is another, more personal objection. How could a world as full of woe as this be the product of a loving creator? What kind of Father would let there be so much sorrow and suffering in the world? Where was God on 9/11? Where was God when the Tsunami struck, or Hurricane Katrina? These are difficult questions. We might wish that, like a parent, God would parachute in and rescue us from disaster. There may be ways in which God is doing so though we don’t realize it and could never prove it. But if in fact God did intervene to stave off disasters, where then would our freedom have gone? It’s proper for parents to intervene and protect their children, but eventually they grow up and strike out on their own. We may lend a hand, perhaps put in a good word for them, but ultimately they are free to make their own lives. Just so are we as well. More than that, if God is Love, are we not also God’s agents here on earth? Are not our own hands the hands of God here? Perhaps our task is to recognize God in the ordinary, in all of our companions, as in this poem from Tukaram, the 17^th Century Hindu poet who wrote in the Marathi language:

I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog "God."

First he looked

confused,

then he started smiling, then he even

danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn't even

bite.

I am wondering if this

might work on

people?[7]

In this way we might say we have what we need as we accept that we are in the arms of God. In this way we say, “Give us this day our daily bread… and deliver us from evil.” So could we understand that the Lebanese survivor of a bomb or the Rwandan survivor of AIDS could properly give credit to God for their survival?

Ultimately, of course, this could never be a matter of proof but rather of faith and hence of commitment. By faith I mean not belief in propositions about God but rather in something which calls to us to follow and to love. Finding the right name for this mystery is difficult—all of the analogies, the names, the specific words may offend or miss the mark. The certainty that we have just the right vision of God, that God is on our side cheering for our side quickly becomes another form of idolatry, of turning God into our creature when we are instead God’s creatures.

Martin Buber, in his masterful I and Thou, suggests that every true relationship between two people points toward a relationship with God, the one You or Thou who cannot be an It, a means toward an end; God can only be known in relationship, never manipulated. Buber says,

Extended, the lives of relationships intersect in the eternal You.

Every single You is a glimpse of that. Through every single You the basic word addresses the eternal You. The mediatorship of the You of all beings accounts for the fullness of our relationships to them—and for the lack of fulfillment. The innate You is actualized each time without ever being perfected. It attains perfection solely in the immediate relationship to the You that in accordance with its nature cannot become an It.

Men have addressed their eternal You by many names. When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You: the first myths were hymns of praise.[8]

Perhaps in understanding being in love and falling in love we can understand that we rest on something beyond ourselves in which we can trust, and that such trust enables us to create the broader reality of love among us and around us.

I don’t know if God wears a red hat or a blue hat; I don’t know if God sits on a throne or a star; I don’t know if God is male or female. But I do know—as our Universalist forebears made the center of their Gospel—that God is Love; that we are made in God’s image; and that God can only truly be known in relationship. For me, that’s a start.

Amen.