If You Must Invoke God
Sermon by Steve Edington
February 5, 2006
It is good to be back with you - which is not to say I didn't enjoy my time away. As some of you know, among my doings of these past few weeks was spending some time with Ric Masten, at his home in Big Sur, gathering stories of his forty plus years as a UU minister, poet, songster, and troubadour which we hope to eventually parlay into a book. And I had myself something of a speaking tour for my "Beat Book," with four venues altogether. That was an interesting experience as well. I found I could ramble on for 20 or 30, or even more, minutes with hardly any notes in front of me. And it served to remind me that I can ramble on, for far too long, if I don't keep a script in front of me. Actually it was my wife who reminded me of that: "You went on too long back there - you were starting to lose people." Yeah well, probably happens on most Sundays as well.
Well, being reminded of my verbosity was really not the most interesting part of my little book tour - there's only so much interest to be had in being reminded of what you already know. The interesting thing was that, unlike the situation here, I was speaking to almost exclusively non-Unitarian Universalist gatherings or audiences. I'd be introduced as a minister who had written a book about God and the Beat Generation writers, with the assumption - or presumption - being that I knew something about both. The next thing I knew I'd be talking to a room full of people, most of whom were folk I did not know, about God. In addition to not knowing who I was talking to, I didn't quite know what I was talking about either! What I hope to show a bit later is that this kind of not knowing is not a bad thing; in fact, it is a good thing. I'll come back to this later.
While I was gingerly talking of God over the past few weeks, others were invoking the term with an apparent great deal of certainty. The most bizarre instance came from the Mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Ray Nagin, who opined that Hurricane Katrina was evidence that God was mad at African Americans for, as he put it, "not taking care of ourselves." I can appreciate the face that this man has been under a tremendous amount of stress and strain over the past five months. I can't say that I'd bear up any better if I had the same kind of stuff to deal with as he's had. But please, Mr. Mayor, take a deep breath and do what you have to do and go laying anything on either God or African-Americans.
In a much more serious and disturbing vein, one of the new elected Palestinian leaders of the Hamas party - brought to you by way of democracy at work in the Middle East - stated that it was the clear will of Allah that the Nation of Israel be destroyed. How well the Hamas party will continue be served by such dangerous and unacceptable rhetoric now that they actually have to govern remains to be seen. But what they offer is one of the more extreme examples of the "God is on our side" mentality and the certitude that accompanies such a sentiment and that justifies anything done in the name of God.
Then the prize, at least in this country, for the Most Outlandish Invocation of God Award went once again to Rev. Pat Robertson for his assertion that the stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a punishment from God for Mr. Sharon's being too accommodating towards the Palestinians. Yes, he apologized for that one. But to the best of my knowledge Rev. Pat has let stand his assertion that the good citizens of Devon, Pennsylvania might somehow be subjected to the wrath of God since the teaching of Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution in their public schools has been overruled by a judge. What both perplexes and even frightens me about Rev. Robertson's invocations of God - and these are only two of his latest ones - are not that he goes around making absurd statements about God. Lots of people do that. But these statements are actually given national exposure because, I presume, of the large following Rev. Robertson manages to maintain. Why does such nonsense keep being played to a national audience?
Speaking of nonsense I can pretty much promise you that around 10:00 p.m. this evening, as the post-game interviews take place, God will be given due credit for bringing a Super Bowl win to either the Steelers or the Seahawks. The reason we all know that's nonsense is because we also know that God is really a Patriots fan. It was really the Almighty who caused those five turnovers in that Broncos game three weeks ago just to give us New Englanders a lesson in humility so we'll be toughened up all the more come next year. There, you see, I can use God to spin things just as well as Rev. Robertson can - and make about as much sense as he does as well. Just for the record here, I'll be pulling for the Steelers this evening, mainly because I'm curious as to what Steeler Coach Bill Cowher's face would look like with a smile on it.
OK, once you dispense with all the nonsense - some of it irksome, some of it dangerous, and some of it just plain silly - about the ways in which the name of God is invoked, are you left with anything at all? Is there any honest meaning to be found at all in the name? This is a question I've grappled with for much of my adult life. I've decided that the most honest way to start looking at any meaningful ways of speaking of God is to acknowledge at the outset that you quite literally do not know what you're talking about.
I take a cue here from one of my colleagues in the UU ministry, the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt - a wonderfully talented and insightful African-American woman who ministers to one of our New York City UU congregations. I find wisdom in these words of hers: "Most of the great Western theologians agree at least on this: God is beyond naming or fully understanding, yet we human beings are called to make the attempt. It is the free faith of Unitarian Universalism that makes my attempts worthwhile." The reason I resonate so strongly with these words is that for reasons I cannot fully explain I, too, feel called to make the attempt of which Rosemary McNatt speaks.
One of the things I spoke about on my mini book tour, in a highly condensed version of my second chapter was about the four landscapes, as I call them, that my own religious and spiritual odyssey has taken me, and of my attempts to speak of God in each one of them. Some of you have heard me speak of these landscapes before. Very briefly the first three are: 1) the evangelical and near-fundamentalist Baptist landscape of my youth and adolescence, then 2) the liberal mainline, mainstream theistic Protestantism that took me from my late college days, through seminary, and into my early years in the ministry; and then 3) there was the agnostic humanistic landscape that I moved into when even the most liberally understood idea of a willful and supernatural Supreme Being ceased to hold water for me. But then somewhere in my moving across that landscape - which included my coming into the UU ministry - I found myself facing a spiritual void. I knew, and still know, that a return to even liberal theism wouldn't address that void. But I was looking for both a language and some good metaphors for what I sensed was a holy or sacred dimension to life that was somehow contained within this often fallen and broken world in which we live. I became aware of a need within my own life for what our current UUA President would later call "a language of reverence."
That's the fourth landscape I began to work my way into - the landscape where the presence of the holy or the sacred might possibly be found in the midst of the mundane or the fallen. One of the metaphors I found for such a landscape is in Allen Ginsberg's poem Sunflower Sutra to which I devoted a chapter, and about which I spoke here last fall. Ginsberg poetically recalls how, one day in the summer of 1955, he saw a sunflower struggling to live and still show forth its beauty in the middle of a dirty, grimy, oily San Francisco railroad yard. And then, taking the sunflower into his own - and our own - human souls Ginsberg writes: "We are not our skin of grime; we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside..." Ginsberg's sunflower points to the presence of the sacred within the ordinary - including the ordinariness of our own lives. From there it wasn't too hard of a step to recast or re-imagine God not as a Being - Supreme or otherwise - but as a presence; the presence of the holy within the mundane. Ginsberg's sunflower, then, is the Beat Face of God. The ten dollar word for this kind of way of understanding God is one I've used before: panenthiesm.
But a language of reverence, whether it includes God language or not, has to speak to more than just what we sense is inside of us. To leave it at that leaves one with not much more than spiritual narcissism. And there seems to be a lot of that going around these days. I take my cue on this one from the passage I read earlier from Rev. Gary Kowalski's book Science and the Search for God. Gary, whose friendship I've enjoyed for nearly as long as I've been minister here as we're both in the same UU District, has written his own "God-book" as well. He got his out a couple years ahead of me. His approach is more scientific, while mine is more poetic, but we both wind up in pretty much the same place. Gary, in the lines I read, draws on an experience by the late Charles Hartshorne. Dr. Hartshorne wrote and taught widely in the field of philosophy of religion, he was an exponent of that "panentheism" to which I just referred. He was also a Unitarian Universalist, and the guy was 103 years old when he passed away in the year 2000. I'm not sure if there's a connection between those four things, but together they make for a pretty full life. I had the pleasure of having dinner one evening with Dr. Hartshorne when he was in his early 80s and I recall that he was sharp as a whip then, and still had over 20 years of living left in him.
In his autobiography, as recounted in Gary's book, Hartshorne recalls being in the midst of despondent, gloomy war-time reflections in World War I France, and then seeing a school yard of happy and playful French children. His realization was that "I am (only) a tiny fragment of human life. The rest of it is not all unfortunate or wretched." And then this same realization by Hartshorne moves beyond the human, in the form of those happy kids, to the earth and universe as well. As Rev. Kowlaski tells it: "He realized that the landscape he beheld was endowed with feeling (and) that instance of sympathetic identification with the world made an impression that would last." That, to me, is what it means - or can mean - to believe in God. It is to believe in the existence of a Deity, neither is it to feel that one is under the rule or sway of a Supreme Being, but rather it is to come to the realization that while my own life does include its divine spark, I am also but a tiny fragment of life. But this tiny fragment that I am also lives in "sympathetic identification with the rest of the world." In other words, as Dr. Hartshorne himself discovered, it's not just about me - it's about all with whom I am in relationship to. The sacredness I find in myself is a part of a larger sacredness found in all that is.
It is out of this awareness of relationship, then, that there comes the call to compassion and the call to be justice makers. The final days of my sabbatical were marked by the loss to our nation, and indeed our world, of very remarkable woman in Coretta Scott King. In fact, in these past few months two women who played pivotal and ongoing roles in one of the most transformative events of our nation in the 20th century, the civil rights movement, passed away: Mrs. King and Rosa Parks. Two women whose lives were often placed at risk on behalf of that cause. It is a memory of Mrs. King that gets me to my final point this morning.
I saw, as best my memory serves, Coretta Scott King only once in my life. It was in late January or early February - the time of year we're in now - of 1969. With some of my fellow seminarians, along with clergy and lay leaders from around the country, and from a wide range of faith communities and traditions, I was in Washington, D.C. for a gathering of an organization called Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam. It was a sobering, if not despairing, time. One year earlier, at a similar gathering, also in the nation's capital, those of us who'd made that one heard a stirring address by Dr. King himself. Now 12 months had gone by. Dr. King had been murdered, as had Robert Kennedy. Many of our cities had erupted in urban riots the previous summer. Lyndon Johnson had resigned the Presidency. Richard Nixon had just taken office. Sometime in the course of that year the number of American dead in Vietnam passed the 50,000 mark; and the number of slain Vietnamese civilians exceeded that count by several fold. And while I was personally feeling pretty good about the life I envisioned before me - there in my 23th year of life - it was not a very happy time in the bigger picture.
Coretta Scott King addressed one of our large gatherings. I remember very little of what she said. Her calm, dignified, measured, and determined presence spoke a message that far transcended her words. But I do remember one thing she said. She referred to a passage her late husband had been fond of citing, and she asked us to keep it in mind, and in our hearts, and not lose faith in its message. The line was, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." What I would not learn until several years later was that those words were originally voiced by the nineteenth century Unitarian minister, Rev. Theodore Parker, in his role as one of the leading abolitionists of his day. The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.
What Theodore Parker and Dr. King and Mrs. King were saying with these words is that there's something about life - mine and yours and the life of the world and universe - that contains within it a call or an urge to a greater wholeness that lies beyond the fragmented and often broken parts of our life and world. Parker's metaphor for that urge towards greater wholeness and fulfillment was what he called the moral arc. And no matter how desperate or fallen the times may seem - as they certainly did in those early weeks of 1969 - that moral arc is still reaching forward into the future and beckoning us to be its agents. To heed the call of that moral arc as it bends towards justice is, I believe, yet another way of believing in God. It means not giving up on who we as people of faith may yet become and cause to happen. This was the message Mrs. King gave her listeners on a very cold winter day many years ago. It is no less timely now that it was then.
By whatever name one may use we are called to live as meaningfully and as devotedly and as compassionately as we can within the greater web of life that ultimately sustains us and all that surrounds us.
Stephen D. Edington
February 5, 2006
