Address:
Is God Keeping You Out of Church?
The Rev.
If you google my 12 year-old daughter,
you will see her one claim to fame, and that is her submission to the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary. She is trying to get a new
word accepted into official usage – the word “confuzzle” meaning, to confuse. She got very excited about her new word after
we listened to a book on tape called “Frindle” about a boy who succeeds in
inventing a new word for the ball point pen.
Being a preacher’s kid, she has arm-twisted several of my colleagues
into promising to use the word confuzzle in a sermon this year, and today is my
day to fulfill on that promise.
William S. Burroughs used to say that
language is a virus. It spreads, grows,
mutates and reproduces uncontrolled by its human hosts. Words have the power to communicate, and they
have the power to cut off communication; words can create clarity and
connection, and they can confuse (I mean confuzzle) or even damage human
relatedness.
Perhaps nowhere in the human lexicon
are words quite so weighted as in the arena of religious language. Throughout history wars have been fought,
individuals martyred, political battles waged, families torn apart, and
communities rent asunder over what constitutes the proper language with which
to express deep reverence for the mysteries of life. When the Roman Emperor Constantine called
together the Council of Nicea in the year 325 to resolve disputes about
language and theology within the Christian church, he invented the idea of
dogma and creed.
Described by a supporter, Eusebius, as “resplendent
in purple and gold,”
The product of the assembly was the
Nicene Creed, as well as a new liturgical calendar which separated the Jewish
Passover from Easter. It also defined
who was in and who was out, as far as orthodoxy was concerned, an exercise in
power which would be repeated throughout the ages until this very day.
Unitarian Universalism, as most of you
know well, is a proudly dissenting tradition.
We brook no creeds or dogmas, but draw from the wisdom of all of the world’s
religious traditions, from the examples of prophetic men and women of all ages,
from the teachings of science and the arts, and from our own experiences of
wonder as we search for truth and meaning.
We forthrightly combine reason with intuition on our faith journeys. It is no surprise that we come to differing
conclusions, not only about the nature of the divine, and what constitutes
meaning in our living, but about the language that we use to describe that we
find worthy of reverence.
Unitarian Universalists struggle with
words like God, prayer, holy, sacred, worship and church. Some of us feel comfortable redefining such
words and employing them freely just as
The power which I cannot
explain or know or name I call God. God
is not God’s name. God is my name for
the mystery that looms within and arches beyond the limits of my being.
Forrest is fond of recounting a story
about the many times he has been approached by congregants over his thirty
years of ministry by individuals who tell him “I don’t believe in God.” “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in”
is his response. This can be the start
of a conversation, rather than the end of one.
For others it feels at least
uncomfortable, and perhaps even like a kick to the gut to hear these words
which may feel devoid of meaning or even harmful given their use in the culture
at large. As David Bumbaugh, a UU
minister who is a humanist explains:
As God and the sacred
texts are drafted to support political agendas of questionable merit, the very
language of faith is emptied of meaning…
The once powerful images and metaphors that enabled the religious
community to stand in judgment on the powers and principalities of the day are
now servants of the status quo, or conventional thinking and practice.
As Unitarian Universalists, we seek
language that is evocative, provocative, creative, and inspiring – a language
that includes rather than exclude, and that conveys the depths of our human
experience in this world. We enjoy the
life of the mind as much as the life of spirit and body – we are readers, thinkers
and lovers of words. We want our
expressions of thought and action to make a prophetic difference in the healing
of our world. We yearn to touch the
ineffable, to speak our truth in love, and to hear one another, but it isn’t
always easy through our differences.
In October of 2002, as a brand new
minister here, I preached a sermon about religious language. As I began my address, I threw down a streamer
of words which I felt I wasn’t allowed to speak from this pulpit. They included words like God and church and
prayer. I got a barrage of letters and
phone calls following that Sunday -- from humanists who felt I was pushing this
congregation too far in the direction of spirituality, from some who wanted to
cheer my bravado, and from theists of all stripes who were essentially “coming
out” as people who longed for more mention of the divine in our services. I was young and feisty then, and perhaps I
hit this issue too early in my time here and too hard, but I do believe that over
the years I’ve been here we have come to be more tolerant of one another’s
language of reverence.
Still, tolerating one another isn’t
perhaps all we can hope for – as one of our intern applicants for next year
said during a phone interview, “toleration” as a goal sets the bar pretty low. It remains to be seen how not just our
congregation but Unitarian Universalism as a whole will live into the tension –
and the promise -- of our diversity when it comes to giving expression to what
is of ultimate truth and worth to each of us.
Will we become known as houses of theological pluralism with shared
values but no shared way of expressing what is of ultimate value? Or do we actually have a compelling and
coherent theological message to offer that is prophetic and transformative, that
will nurture the individual spirit and help heal our world?
The recent ad campaign launched by the
UUA in Time Magazine and elsewhere asks, provocatively, “Is God Keeping You
from Going to Church?” It continues:
Maybe you’re uncomfortable
with the idea of God – or at least someone else’s idea of God. Yet maybe you yearn for a loving, spiritual
community where you can be inspired and encouraged as you search for truth and
meaning. This is a church, you ask? Welcome to Unitarian Universalism.
I have mixed feelings about this
approach to advertising, which perpetuates the idea that Unitarian Universalism
is a faith at the margins of society.
Don’t fit in the box you were born into?
Break free and join us. It isn’t
exactly wrong to revel in our sort of alternative, “we’re not really a religion”
approach to religious life. Part of the
appeal of Unitarian Universalism to me when I discovered it was its willingness
to stand up to the status quo, and to embrace heretical thinking. But as with all things, what is our strength
– our willingness to be different and to question everything – also carries
with it a shadow side. In our case that
shadow is an over-emphasis on individualism, a lack of spiritual discipline and
depth, and a certain prickliness when it comes to how we choose our words. And that
is perhaps what keeps us not only small in numbers, but small in our impact
upon our world at large.
Recently I had the pleasure of
attending the installation of the new senior minister at All Soul’s
In her sermon, Dr. Eck, who is herself
a Methodist, named Unitarian Universalism as the “church of the new millennium,”
challenging us to take seriously our prophetic mission to our world (and please
stay with me as I quote from her address at some length):
Refining our understanding
of interbeing is certainly one of the great religious tasks of our time. When the Indian American astronaut Sunita
Williams circled the world this last year from the space station, she said
through a live satellite feed innocently, yet profoundly, “It’s hard to imagine
anyone arguing down there.”
From one perspective we are
that blue planet Earth seen from the distance of space, that beautiful blue
planet swirling with clouds. We are down
here arguing, riven with conflict and competition and discord, with anxiety,
with ambition, fear and flattery. And if
there were ever a time that we need to spin out a new fabric of belonging and a
wider sense of “we” for the human community, it is certainly now.
…I believe that Unitarian
Universalists have a very important role in this new religious American and the
new millennium of the world in which we live. You are, in my estimation, the church of the
new millennium. In this era, Unitarian
Universalism is not the lowest common denominator, but the highest common
calling…
In a world divided by race
and by religion and ideology, the very presence of a church like this,
committed to the oneness of God, the love of God, the love of neighbor and
service to humanity is a beacon. The
Unitarian theology, and yes you have one, does not reduce the mystery of the
divine, the transcendent, but amplifies it, broadens it to include the
investigation of the many, many ways in which the divine is known and yet
unknown…
The world is in need of
your theology.
It is a strong calling. At times it seems easier to simply avoid
religious language and all that it provokes.
I find myself mining our hymnbook for songs, counting the times they
mention God, but to do so is to lose something of the richness therein, the
spirituals and gospels that are so beautiful.
Even more, to do so is to perhaps abdicate the responsibility that our
Unitarian Universalist faith has to provide a clear message of hope and love in
the fields of human heartbreak, and hurt, and need.
Language is a virus, and words do not
remain frozen but evolve over time. Look
at the word “gay” which once meant happy and now refers to a homosexual male,
or the phrase “world wide web” which once simply meant the interdependent
reality of our complex universe, and now refers to the network in virtual
space. We do need to be sensitive to the
fact that words like “church” carry a cultural weight. Many of our friends and members were raised
in the Jewish tradition, and the world “church” does refer mostly to the
Christian word for a house of worship, even if etymologically, one of the many
possible roots for the word is the pagan idea of worshipping in a circle, a “circe”
in Anglo-Saxon. Personally, I prefer “congregation”
to “Society,” which has its own associations, but that is a discussion for
another day!
Likewise, words like “God” “holy” and “divine”
are fraught with the meanings we have added to it, and are offensive or
meaningless for some. And yet I’m not
willing to simply give up such words altogether, not only because for me
personally they continue to have meaning, but because I know that they are deeply
meaningful to people who come here because they are struggling with God, and are
honestly engaging in the journey to find meaning in their lives. These words also allow us to communicate
cross-culturally, and in interfaith settings.
It is difficult to claim that we are a religion, and then to do away
with all religious vocabulary.
I guess what I’m asking for is more
than tolerance – but a willingness to welcome all ways of expression what is of
ultimate value. If you don’t like to
pray or to hear about God, remember that someone you care deeply about, someone
you may even love, sitting just three rows from you is hungry, deeply hungry,
to touch the face of the divine in order to gain strength and a sense of
meaning in her life. And if you think
that our approach is too intellectual, and you wish that God and prayer were
woven through all of our services, remember that a person you deeply care
about, two rows away, finds no solace in God but longs deeply to lift up the
wonders and challenges of our human life, and of nature, in order to gain
strength and a sense of meaning in his life.
For the humanist UU, the religious story is that of the evolution
of our universe. As my colleague David
Bumbaugh puts it so beautifully,
It is a religious story in that it calls us our of
our little local universes and invites us to see ourselves in terms of the
largest self we can imagine – a self that was present, in come sense, in the
singularity that produced the emergent universe; a self that was present, in some
sense, at the birth of the stars; a self that, in some sense, is related
through time to every living thing on this planet; a self that contains within
it the seeds of a future we cannot imagine in our wildest flights of fancy.
For the theist, the deist, the
panentheist, the pagan, the religious story may be very similar in that it
moves one to an expanded sense of self, but it will be cached in different
language, perhaps an “Awful Rowing Towards God.” Despite the exuberance of that
poem, Anne Sexton wrote it during the final weeks before her suicide, as she
herself was struggling for meaning. It
may be spoken of as a journey of the spirit, or an experience of transcendent
mystery, or an awareness of the oneness of all beings.
Regardless of exactly how you, in your
particularity of experience and understanding, choose to express what is of
ultimate value, that which you cherish and revere, we as Unitarian
Universalists do have a prophetic place in this new millennium, and we have a
calling to hear. We are called, I
believe, to offer a message, a theological one, that says we are each sparks of
the divine, sparks of life in an infinitely complex universe, each precious, each
intricately connected to the whole. We
are beautiful in our diversity, not in our sameness; and yet we are one.
May the love that sustains you and the
peace that surpasses all division be with you as you journey on through this
wonderful swirling blue planet we call home.
Out of the dusk a shadow, then a spark; out of the stardust, life. I love you so for your untamable, eternal,
gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love. To all
that is holy, that includes rather than excludes, that creates, that gives
life, that offers healing, I say amen.
May it be so.