The God We Never Knew
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
October 8, 2000
(This sermon was preceded by reading excerpts from the first chapter of The God We Never Knew by Marcus Borg. In this chapter he relates his experience of growing up in a rural Lutheran church in North Dakota. Portions of the reading are contained in the sermon.)
In my newsletter description of my topic for today I said this would be my "what I learned in summer school" sermon. I've come to notice in recent years that for me "learning" has as much to do with my being reminded of things I already know, as it does about my gaining new information as such. I've also noticed that some of those reminders can be as powerful as being hit with a new idea for the first time. This should not, however, be taken to mean that I feel I've now learned everything worth knowing, or everything I need to know. When I reach that point I may well have run out of reasons to live. But some of my more significant learning experiences of late have really been reminders of things I've known in one way or another for some time, and being re-awakened to them once again. I received two such awakening reminders during the last week of June this past summer.
One awakening/reminder was pretty academic and took place, not exactly in an ivory tower, but up in the hills of Berkeley, California looking out over a very panoramic view the San Francisco Bay Area. It was there that I took a week-long course with Dr. Marcus Borg at the Pacific School of Religion. The course was part of a continuing education program for ministers offered through Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union; a very good program I've taken advantage of for the past few summers. The second awakening took place across the Bay in an area of San Francisco you won't likely find in the travel guides. The two awakenings had nothing, and everything, to do with each other. I'll start with Berkeley though, and save the San Francisco streets for later.
Marcus Borg is one of those persons that I'll read a book he's written and think, "Gee, I'd like to meet this guy sometime." So when I saw he was teaching one of the courses for the GTU summer series I figured it was put up or shut time. OK, go meet him then. Dr. Borg is Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, and operates somewhere out on the left fringe of the Protestant Christian spectrum, where some rather creative thinking and writing is taking place these days. Borg was a member of the "Jesus Seminar" team back in the early 1990s. The Jesus Seminar was an attempt by theologians and Biblical scholars to determine which of the words and actions ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament are authentic and which are embellishments and mythologies that were added on by the first and second century Church. I'd call Borg--and I think he would accept this--a Christian Universalist in that he recognizes and affirms that truth is in no way confined to any one religious faith; but he continues to relate to the language and imagery of Christianity. He does so with considerably more affinity for that language and imagery than I do--which is why he is content to still call himself a "capital C" Christian while I do not. I can go with being a "small c" christian, however. It is Borg's theology and his own religious journey that fascinates me most.
The selections I read from the first chapter of his book The God We Never Knew, which was also the text we used in the course, are about his early religious experiences; and they mirror my own--mine was West Virginia Baptist; his was North Dakota Lutheran. (Mr. Borg actually sounds like he grew up in Minnesota's Lake Wobegon, which in a sense he did; just with a different name.) But there's more than simply me seeing myself in that opening chapter that caused it to hold my attention; Borg tells a story I've heard countless variations on during my 22 years in the Unitarian Universalist ministry as I talk, and share stories with people who are members--both new and long time--of the UU congregations I've served. Many of those stories end on a similar note as that of Borg's: "By the time I was thirty, like Humpty Dumpty, my childhood faith had fallen to pieces." Well, they don't quite end there; the next line, more often than not is "and I've been an atheist or agnostic ever since, and didn't think there could be any kind of a religious community for me until I found this one." Which is well and good; one of the reasons we are here is for folk like these. Dr. Borg, however, took a somewhat different route as he moved on from the Humpty Dumpty broken pieces of his childhood faith. He says, "I have realized that one may be an atheist regarding the God of supernatural theism and yet be a believer in God conceptualized in another way, namely the way offered by panentheism. This is the God I never knew." Its a God I wanted to learn more about.
I haven't done any surveys on this, but I would guess that 90 percent of the people who call themselves atheists (whether they are UUs or not), are those who, like Dr. Borg, have rejected what he calls supernatural theism. Supernatural theism, as the term suggests, is belief in God as a Supreme Being who somehow exists apart from the natural world and universe--"out there" somewhere--and who can intentionally affect the operation of the natural world should He choose to do so. (I'm using the pronoun "He" since this is how such a God in generally regarded.) This God is also omnipresent--present everywhere--so he knows who we each and all are and what we are up to, and will shake his finger (or worse) at us when we are up to no good. I know that God's omnipresence can also regarded in a very positive way. It offers the assurance that the God of supernatural theism personally knows us and loves us and cares about us and will take good care of us: "His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me" as the very comforting words of a hymn I heard over and over during my youth put it. For all of the comfort I derived from such a God at a much earlier stage of my life, I am now with Borg in saying that if this is the only belief-in-God possibility that's available, then I'd have to declare myself an atheist. The God of supernatural theism, as I came to conclude long ago, is a mythological figure.
But Borg embraces an alternative to atheism; a "third way" if you will. He calls it "panentheism." It's a rather convoluted term, but no more so than, say, Unitarian Universalism. It is not to be confused with pantheism which holds that all of reality, material reality, is a manifestation of God. I could never quite go with that myself; if everything is God, then the term "God" itself is basically meaningless as there is no way to distinguish it from anything else. If everything is God, then nothing is God.
Panentheism, as I've come to understand it is not so much a definition of God as it is a way of looking at life, or a way of encountering the world in which we live. It holds that there is something of the sacred or the holy contained within the ordinary or the everyday, and if we stay open to it that sacredness will on occasion break through. I have been moving towards this kind of perspective for some time. I lost interest some time ago, quite frankly, in trying to come up with an intellectually defensible definition I could put after the word G-o-d. What I am more concerned about and focused on at this point in my life is how do I continue to walk through life and really see it. In the concluding act of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town the character Emily Gibbs asks, from the perspective of her deceased state, "don't people realize life while they live it?" That, indeed, is the challenge of faith as I see it; to realize life while we live it; to believe that within this seemingly mundane world there is an element of the holy that on occasion breaks through and blesses us, and lets us know that life is indeed worth the journey.
Panentheism is a term for this kind of perspective or approach to life. It is an approach I seek to cultivate. The awakening part for me in this course was finding a term for an idea I've already embraced. I don't generally go around calling myself a "panentheist" because I don't personally feel the need to even have a theological label tacked on to my lapel. But if I am pushed to pin such a label on myself, for purposes of identification as it were, that would be it.
Since Dr. Borg is a Christian theologian, and is writing, and speaking, to a largely liberal Christian audience, he devotes a considerable amount of his writing and speaking attempting to make his panentheism compatible with Christian teachings and with Biblical writings. I can appreciate his doing that. The title of his course, in fact, was "Revisioning Christianity for the New Millennium." His re-vision of Christianity is a Christian faith that is recast in a panentheistic mold. I can only wish him the best. Personally I didn't need to him to do all that for me, but I think he's right to challenge the Christian community to get beyond its predominant supernatural theism. How successful he'll be remains to be seen.
Borg does include in his book some words by the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, however, that did strike a chord with me as Tagore describes what could be called a panentheistic moment: "I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist had been lifted from my sight and the ultimate significance of all things laid bare...and no person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial or unpleasing." The reader is not told the actual experience of Tagore's that prompted these words, but I was struck by Tagore's phrase about how "no person or thing in the world seemed to me to be trivial." That, I feel, is what it means to realize life--to see no person or thing in the world as trivial. From the standpoint of panentheism that is what it means to believe in God.
On that note, I'll come down from the Berkeley hills and go to the streets where my other summer awakening took place. This story begins not in San Francisco, though, but a block up the street from here at the Davis Funeral Home. About 3-4 weeks before heading off to Berkeley I got a call asking if I would officiate at a funeral there for someone who had no identifiable religious affiliation. I seem to be the one who gets those calls. But this one was different from most of the ones like that I get. The deceased in this case was a young man of 34 who had died homeless on the streets of San Francisco. He'd grown up in this community and was a graduate of Nashua High School. He had no immediate family in town anymore. His parents had divorced, and remarried (or re-partnered), and moved away from here. But they had a family plot in Hollis and wanted him to be buried there. So this was where his service was to be. His name was Trent.
In talking with his parents, his sister, and other members of his family I learned of a very gifted and talented individual who, for whatever reason, could not adapt himself to the usual life patterns that most of us follow and adapt ourselves to. Without their getting contentious about it, there was a mixture of opinion as to whether or not Trent had chosen a life on the street. There was an acknowledgement that he'd had his occasional struggles with alcohol. Whether this had contributed to his death or not, I was not told. He was also a very able writer and journalist. I was shown some articles he'd written about the lives of the homeless in San Francisco for some of that City's alternative style newspapers. He wrote with passion and anger and a very unsentimental kind of love. I couldn't help but be impressed; this was a very talented individual. One of his favorite books, as it turned out was Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums"--the same book that had introduced me to Kerouac. I even used some of it in the service. The service was packed; a lot of people were there who had known him from his high school days. Some of his friends and family members spoke. They wanted to honor a life that they also had to struggle to understand.
After the service a gentleman from Connecticut spoke to me. His daughter, a recent Boston College graduate, was working for an human service outfit in San Francisco known as the General Assistance and Advocacy Project, and had known Trent. She'd even arranged for a memorial service to be held for him at the vacant lot where he usually slept. She asked her father to attend his service in Nashua on her behalf. When I told him I was going to be out that way in a few weeks, he said his daughter--whose name is Connie--might want to meet me. I gave him my e-mail address and heard from her about a week later. We made arrangements to meet on one of the afternoons during my stay there.That is how I came to find myself, a few weeks later, in the battered up lobby of a battered up store front type building asking for someone named Connie, as people from the streets came in looking for leads on jobs, places to stay, any available assistance and the like.
Connie said she wanted to show me some of Trent's places, and we began walking. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but this was its underside. No tourist map will direct you here. We passed a line of people waiting to get into a church to be served a meal. We were stopped by someone with a story as to why he needed money. In a very calm, cheerful, and yet firm way my walking companion told him where to go to get the help he said he needed. She seemed to know a lot of the people we passed; and whatever discomfort I felt by the grim surroundings was offset by her dogged determination to be a positive presence there. I'm not sure how I would have felt had I been there by myself, but I did feel completely safe walking in the company of a young woman less than half my age.
She introduced me to a few people we happened to encounter who had known Trent, telling them I'd conducted his funeral service back in New Hampshire. They would tell me about how they'd known him, and what their life was like for having had him as a friend. Then we came to a small vacant lot with a tree one corner of it where two buildings met at a right angle. This, my walking companion told me, was where Trent lived--under that forlorn looking tree. There was a pile of withered, dried out flowers scattered around its trunk that his friends had placed there a few weeks earlier. Connie asked it I'd say a little prayer for him next to the tree before we left the site and I obliged. Then we walked back to where she worked--and I went over the Bay Bridge and back up to the Berkeley hills. Our walk had lasted maybe half an hour.
The last thing I want to do at this point is to romanticize or sentimentalize poverty or homelessness as there is not one thing romantic or sentimental about being down and out on the street with no place to go. Neither do I want to try to explain--or fix blame--as who is what is responsible for what with respect to what I saw that afternoon. I don't think there is one single explanation or one single culprit as to why some people struggle for existence in one of the wealthiest areas of this country. It's a tough issue, and a crucially important matter, and one I'm not going to attempt to untangle right now. But what I saw in that short little journey was more than struggles for material survival. It was that to be sure, but that wasn't the whole picture. There was also a need and a desire by both my companion and guide, and by some of those we met, to affirm a life that had touched other lives. That sad looking pile of month old flowers in the corner of a beaten up piece of ground had a voice, or a collection of voices, behind it that said: "We here on these hard and uncertain streets grieve our losses too; we too can say yes to the life of someone who cared about us; our lives are precious and fragile too--no less so than these flowers."
There was something holy in that pile of dead and rotting flowers, just as there was something holy about one young woman efforts to bring a little hope to an area so full of despair; just as there was something holy in the lives of those who had been touched by the life that ended in that vacant lot. Recall Tagore's words: "I suddenly felt as if an ancient mist had been lifted from my sight and the ultimate significance of all things laid bare...and no person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial..." For just a few fleeting minutes I think I got a glimpse of what Tagore was trying to say; and that was the other awakening.
I said at the beginning of these thoughts that the two awakenings had nothing and everything to do with each other. One happened in the very literal lofty heights of academia; and the other took place, again quite literally down on the dirty streets. One came via the words of an esteemed scholar and theologian, the other from persons struggling for some of life's barest necessities. The common message from these two settings, though, is contained within the ordinariness of life, and sometimes contained even within the meaner and crueler aspects of life, is the truth that none of this is really trivial when seen in a certain light. There is a Presence, a Power, a Spirit within that ordinariness--even within that meanness--that can bless us and summon us to keep faith with both the life we live and the life to which we aspire.
To let go of the God of Supernatural Theism is not, as I see it, to let go or give up on catching glimpses of the Divine, the Sacred, the Holy within this infinitely natural world and universe in which we live and move and have our being. For this is our home, and it's the only home we have.
Copyright © 2000 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
