Belief for Non-Believers
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 27, 2009
[This sermon was preceded by the singing of Woody Guthrie's God's Promise by Dan Murphy, Kathy Grossman, and Harry Purkhiser.]
"I'd love to believe it. Any of it. Just the littlest bit of it. Just one lousy barrel of water turned into wine. Just a half a barrel. A quart. I'll even settle for a pint." For those of you who caught the sermon I did last spring wherein I paid tribute to the recently departed author, John Updike, the words might ring a bell since I used them then. They're spoken by a fictitious character named Freddy Thorne, who is a dentist in Updike's novel Couples. The setting is a wine and cheese party in an upscale North Shore Massachusetts neighborhood, where the subject has somehow gotten around to religion, and where most of the attendees have fallen away from one version of Protestant Christianity or another. I think Updike also throws in a lapsed Catholic or two.
They'd all learned back in their Sunday school or CCD days the story of Jesus turning the water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana; and that's the story that is recalled as they sip their own wine and munch on hors d'oeuvres and - since it is an Updike novel after all - exchange fleeting glimpses between whichever ones are having affairs with whichever other ones. The novel's one word title Couples operates on several levels.
Freddy is the self-designated cynic in this circle of sort-of friends. And yet, read in a certain way, we can see Freddy Thorne, with just those few words of his, go from scoffing to pleading. From, oh yeah sure I'd love to believe that, to can't I have just a little something to hold onto, a little bit of the miraculous or the mysterious that I can believe in? Heck, "I'll even settle for a pint."
The genius of John Updike, like that of any good writer, is that he could capture a world with just a few words. In as secular a setting as he could make it, and with as secular a character as Freddy Thorne, Updike captured a truth about religion and belief in the modern West. Fundamentalists excepted, we have developed minds that take our thinking well beyond the literalness of the myths and legends and fanciful stories in which are found in the stories of most traditional religions. But we still continue to reach out beyond ourselves in a desire to connect with something greater than ourselves. We often experience that reaching out when some of our more secular pursuits and ambitions bring us up short - to the point that we'll even settle for a pint.
This same dilemma was summed up by another very gifted individual working in a field quite different from that of Mr. Updike. Dr. Edward O. Wilson, one of the more renowned and widely written biologists of our time, has noted that "The human mind has evolved to believe in gods and not in biology." That's a remarkable statement coming, as it does, from a world-renowned biologist, who spent most of his career at Harvard.
What Dr. Wilson is saying is that while we have minds that can question and, in some cases, reject some of the more traditional aspects of traditional religions, we are unwilling, and unable, to reduce ourselves to just biological entities. We humans are the species on this planet who have evolved to the point that we ask the "why" question - in a way that I doubt any other of the creatures with whom we share this planet do. We are the ones who have figured it out that we're going to die - and are therefore the ones who seek, if not demand, some greater meaning to our lives in the face of our mortality. Many of us do resonate with that definition of religion offered by Forrest Church, whose passing we observed earlier in this service. Religion, Forrest said, is "our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing we will die." It is how we come to terms with life, that is to say, in the face of our mortality. We have evolved, then, to be believers; however much we - like Updike's Freddy Thorne - may struggle with the content of belief. Freddy's plea, "I'd love to believe it" resonates well.
I plan to devote several sermons to this theme over the course of our church year. They roughly parallel the chapters I envision for yet another book I have in mind with the same title I'm using today: "Belief for Non-Believers." I got a toehold start on this project over the summer. One way to keep me working on the thing is to make myself do sermons I can turn into chapters. Today you're getting a working draft of Chapter One.
To make one more pass at Dr. Wilson, he notes, "[Human]kind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief." I'm not sure where Wilson gets that 100,000 religions figure as it sounds a little high to me, but I won't quibble over it since his larger point is well taken. Whether one chooses to call it "religion" or not, we all pursue belief of one kind or another. This is why I take exception to the very term "Non-Believer" since I don't think there are any such folk - except maybe for the out and out nihilist. Nihilism is the rejection of any kind of belief system, which actually is a belief system in and of itself.
The term Non-Believer is generally used to refer to persons who have rejected the beliefs (small 'b') of one traditional religion or another; or who have rejected any of the more traditional concepts of God. But such rejection, in and of itself, does not make one a "non-believer." And this gets me to the argument I have with Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion.
I did a whole sermon on Dr. Dawkins a couple of years ago when his book first came out, so this will just be a quick fly-by. I have very little to quarrel with when it comes to his debunking of idea of a Supernatural Supreme Being who can work His (Hers/Its) will on the world; or who stands on the side of one particular nation, or who represents one particular ideology, against all others. Such a god is a delusion, and often times a dangerous and deadly delusion.
My quarrel with Dawkins, in fact, has very little to do with the content of his argument; instead it is over how he frames the debate. He first puts forth what he calls "The God Hypothesis" which he defines in this way: "There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it including us." He then goes on to state that this is the only idea of God that is worth debating. He defines the debate, that is to say, on his own terms, and then - surprise, surprise! - goes on the win. It's not that hard to win a game, after all, when you're the one making the rules.
I'll grant Dr. Dawkins that his God Hypothesis is the most commonly held one; but it's far from the only one. What he does is take a particular notion of God, put it in a box, and then blows up the box. He does not want to muddy up his God Hypothesis with anything that gets outside of or beyond his box. He has little use, for example, for another way of believing called Naturalistic Theology. Naturalistic theology holds that some sense of the holy, the sacred, the divine (whom some who think and believe this way call "God") can be found within the natural world and universe and there's no need to look for anything beyond that. Just so you don't have to psych me out here, this is the camp I find myself in these days, even though I go pretty light on the God references myself.
What Dawkins does, to give him due credit, is a very good job of clearing away the non-sense, the underbrush, the debris, when it comes to finding a sustaining place to stand as we encounter our world and universe. He seems to think, however, that once the clearing out is done the job itself is done. What Dawkins does is offer a staring point, not a conclusion. He creates a clearing in the forest. But a clearing is not really a place to stand - or a place to park your car, to use a metaphor I introduced last Sunday. And as a counterpoint to Dawkins' God "delusion" I would offer the just cited line from Dr. E.O. Wilson, "It is an illusion [emphasis added] to think the scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief."
Moving on now, the conclusion I've come to at this point in my life when it comes to matters of religious belief is that being a believer means living and acting and relating and taking stands as if certain things were true, in the absence of sure and absolute knowledge. Here's a childhood story by one of my UU ministerial colleagues, the Rev. Terry Sweetser, to help move us in this direction:
"I was seven years old when I had my first encounter with theology. My mother made a batch of fudge, placed it in the refrigerator, and decreed it could not be sampled until after supper. I was not pleased. I contrived every scheme I could imagine to sneak some, but someone always seemed to be in the kitchen. At about four o'clock I got a break. My mother and sister had to go to the store, leaving me alone. Mother must have been reading my mind because she gave me a warning on the way out. 'Just because I'm not here don't think you're alone with the fudge. God is watching you.'
"The word theology means God-study. As they drove off I was studying hard. It did not take me long to conclude that I was a seven year old atheist. Boy did that fudge taste good! Unfortunately for me, my mother had counted the pieces, and the recount on her return showed a deficit of three. When asked how I could brazenly have taken the fudge in front of God, I said, "I don't believe in God." My ever-practical Unitarian mother responded, while administering my first spanking, "It would be in your best interests to act as if God were there."
It's a light-hearted, and even with the spanking part, a humorous story; which is what Terry intends in telling it. But it's also a light-hearted way of getting at the deeper issue of what it means to be a person of faith - a Believer. Living by faith, or living with Belief (with a capital 'B') does not mean clinging to or grasping after alleged or supposed Certainty. That is a delusion. But there is another way of being a Believer. It means living as if certain truths abide - as if God were there, to put it in the language of theology.
I got a number of gifts last summer from one of my spiritual guides, Sam Keen, in the week I spent taking a seminar he offered. I spoke about some of that last Sunday. One such gift is his idea - which he shared - of what he calls "radical trust." Radical trust is the real counterpoint to blind or unquestioning faith. It is a third way of being a believer. The usual dichotomy, which Dawkins and others put forth (a false dichotomy in my opinion), is that you have reflexive and largely unexamined belief on the one side; or atheistic non-belief on the other. Keen's radical trust is a third way. Radical trust is not a creed, or set of prescribed beliefs; rather it is an attitude and a choice to walk through life as if certain things are true; as if you will be supported and nurtured and sustained as you take that walk.
Dr. Keen's favorite metaphor for radical trust is one I've used before - and one he revisited in our week together. It's a TV cartoon he recalled from his childhood of a cat being chased by a dog until the cat comes to the edge of a lake with the dog bearing down. Without breaking stride the cat starts running across the lake. As he runs a series of lily pads keep coming up to meet his feet just as they're about to hit the water. The cat is doing fine until he looks down and starts getting unduly anxious about whether or not another lily pad is going to appear - which is when the lily pads stop and the poor creature sinks; much to the delight of the dog who stands on the shore and laughs.
That little story has been one of my metaphors for living for much of my life - to walk as if I will be sustained on my journey even though I do not know where the lily pads are ultimately coming from; and trying not to get too anxious about when and where the next one will appear. That's radical trust. Sam Keen's alternate term for it is "trustful agnosticism." That is to say, living with an attitude or stance of trust towards life itself, even as you make no claim to have any sure or absolute knowledge of where that trust is ultimately grounded. It is to live with what another theologian, Paul Tillich, called "The Courage to Be"; the courage, that is, to walk through life, continuing to believe in life - even with all the wounds and scars and pain that life also visits upon us.
This finally gets me to Woody Guthrie. When Dan, Kathy, and Harry and I put that "Spirit of Woody Guthrie" service together back in March I found myself quite taken by Woody's poem, later set to music by Ellis Paul, called God's Promise. The thing that intrigued me was that although Woody titled it "God's Promise" there's no actual reference to a Deity anywhere in it. We don't really know who the "I" is that purports to be speaking here.
Speaking personally, and recalling Keen's trustful agnosticism, I don't need to know who is finally speaking these words. I just need to know they're true; that they offer the message I need to hear from Life Itself while walking through life. Maybe the message comes from the same voice that Woody once heard chanting, "This land was made for you and me."
Wherever it comes from, the message is one worthy of trust:
"I didn't promise you skies painted blue. Not colored flowers all your days through.
"I didn't promise you sun with no rain. Joys without sorrow, peace without pain."
Instead:
"All that I promise is strength for this day. Rest for the worker and light on your way..."
Where this message, or this Promise, comes from is not near as important as that we get it and believe it and trust in it. It's a message, as just noted, from life itself. It also speaks to what we must offer one another in this beloved community we continue to build, even as we seek it for ourselves: "Strength for this day...rest as we work and light on our way" along with "Truth when we need it and unfailing love."
We live the only lives we have in the only world in which we've been given to live them. What we most need to believe is that this is enough.
Stephen Edington
September 27, 2009
