God, and Other Four-Letter Words
a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First
Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, November 7, 2010,
after two readings, the first from Susan Jacoby, writing
as “The Spirited Atheist” in the Sept. 22, 2010, edition of The Washington
Post:
All religions have
martyrs, and that is one reason I object to both religion and martyrology. I do believe that there are things worth
dying for, although I doubt that I would ever have the strength to withstand
torture myself. I honor people who died
rather than give up the location of hidden Jews during World War II. I honor people who were beaten within an inch
of their lives during the civil rights movement so that the next generation
might have a greater share of "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness." I honor people who risk
their own lives to save their children (though this may be more of a basic
biological instinct than a considered decision.) What all of these actions do have in common
is that they involve saving other human lives.
I do not believe
that upholding the spiritual authority of one man over another (the pope over a
king) is worth dying for. I do not
believe it is worth dying to assert that Jesus was or was not the Messiah. I do not believe it is worth dying for the
right to mumble the mass in a language that most of the faithful don't
understand. Benedict's basic message
throughout his visit to the United Kingdom was that England has become a
largely secular society and that the mission of his church is to challenge
"aggressive forms of secularism."
It was in this context that he cited the names of Catholic martyrs. He might reflect that since secularists have
been more or less in charge, no one has been drawn and quartered for professing
a particular religious belief. But oh,
how painful it is to be mocked!
And a second reading from Forrest Church in A Chosen
Faith, speaking of a “Cathedral of the World” with many stained glass windows
through which ‘One Light’ shines:
God, and Other Four-Letter Words
John Murray came to the United States as a last resort, really. In his native England, Murray’s wife and young son had died in an epidemic, his Methodist views had shifted so drastically towards Universalism that even his friends wouldn’t discuss it with him anymore, he had nothing to show for himself and no way to make a living, so he came to a point where he felt that his only choices were committing suicide or taking a slow boat to America.
Luckily for us, John Murray chose the latter, and in early autumn, 1770, his ship came within sight of the New Jersey shoreline. When the ship got stranded on a sandbar, Murray was sent ashore seeking help, and made his way to the house of one Thomas Potter, who greeted Murray with the words, “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time!” Shocked, Murray learned that Potter had built a little church in the woods and prayed to God to send him a preacher. And, God working in those usually mysterious ways, here he was. And boy, could he preach.
Murray’s message of Universal salvation struck a chord with people sick of hearing about the sinfulness and degradation of humanity and how they and everybody else were going to hell. Murray said ‘no’; he said, “You’re not going to hell. Oh, the worst of us might need to be singed in the flames for awhile to rid us of our sins, but eventually all of us will be reaping our eternal reward and going to live forever with God in heaven.
Murray’s Universalist message began the march toward erasing a four-letter word, h-e-l-l, from the vocabulary of congregations in our own tradition and, further, his views have had a great impact on other mainstream Protestant traditions, many of whom are loath to talk about the idea of hell now in the 21st century. It was a long time coming, but ‘hell’ has been pretty much excised from many religious traditions in this country.
Now, was that a good thing or not? I know I’ve tried to teach our kids that most of us UU’s and other liberal Christians don’t believe there is an actual place called hell - that’s just not in our cosmology anymore. In fact, I read a study that found that, while most Americans still say they believe in a place called heaven, very few believe in an actual place called hell. If we no longer believe there’s a place called hell, I certainly believe there is a state of mind that could be considered hell - I’ve been there, maybe you have, too.
Nonetheless, Murray’s ideas have won the day, and ‘hell’ is not a word we use very often.
Speaking of excising four-letter words from our vocabulary, when Linda and I arrived in Italy a few weeks ago, I developed the very bad habit of using one particular four-letter word almost without thinking about it. Consider: one day we woke up here - which really isn’t so bad - but the next day we woke up in Rome, for God’s sake. All of a sudden, everywhere I turned was yet another fabulous work of art, or yet another landmark that I’d heard about and read about all my life that had changed the course of world history, or another unbelievably beautiful church, and the word just came out: “Holy ----!” This was not a response I expected, and is certainly not something I’m proud of, but it happened over and over and over again. I would walk up a few old marble steps and into a church and my eyes would pop out and my head would go back and my mouth would drop open and out would come, “Holy ----!” This happened every day for awhile, whether I was alone or in a crowd. And we were in a lot of crowds. Linda kept telling me that all those French and German high school students we were surrounded by knew what that word meant - everybody knows four-letter words in English.
I know it was embarrassing for Linda. But I was just so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all. I was unprepared for the intensity of my emotional response to the world I suddenly found myself a part of.
So besides ‘hell,’ there are other four-letter words we best not use in polite society.
I had a friend who came to visit this church some years back - 15 or 20 years ago now, I think. She came for more than just a visit: she’d been invited to preach on a Sunday morning and, never having been here before, she was excited at the prospect of meeting the people she’d talked to on the phone and seeing the beautiful old building she’d heard so much about. When I saw her again after her Sunday here, she said it had frankly been a strange and difficult experience for her, because even though she’d been a minister for some time, she’d never before been told that she used a bad word during a sermon. But that morning she had been told by people here, in no uncertain terms, that ‘God’ was not a word she should use in this pulpit.
She was shocked, out of naďveté, perhaps, because this attitude that ‘God’ is a bad word does have some historical precedence in our tradition. Plenty of Unitarians and Unitarian ministers in the latter half of the 19th century became convinced of the necessity of leaving the Christian tradition behind. They were on a quest for a new religion that would be more in line with the truths they saw coming to light: with the rise of scientific inquiry and the focus on the human mind and rational thinking, the ideals of the Enlightenment seemed to be the way out of the morass of superstitions that pervaded religion at the time - still pervades it in some circles today.
It may have been the very real horrors of what we humans were capable of doing to each during the First World War that led a group of people (all men, including Curtis Reese, minister of this church from 1913 to 1915) to produce the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 that proclaimed the need for a new religion, a new Religious Humanism, that eschewed superstition in favor of a focus on the human dimension while still religiously recognizing the grandeur of this existence. As religious humanism spread across the culture and within some of our congregations, it also began, over time, to lose some of its ‘religious’ focus and to become not religious humanism but secular humanism and some adherents began to regard ‘spirit’ as a bad word, requiring that any opinion, religious or otherwise, be verifiable as scientific fact. In this case, the biblical narrative is borne out once again, where it says that we humans are prone to idolatry, and we will make idols not just of golden calves and foreign gods but of science and of rationality and of our own minds as well.
In
the UU&You! 2.0 class that’s met the last couple of weeks, we’ve been
reading A Chosen Faith by Forrest Church and John Buehrens, that reminds
us of this history. The Rev.’s Church
and Buehrens also remind us that our Unitarian and Universalist traditions are
ones that don’t ask us to choose between science and religion, or between the
physical and the metaphysical, or between the rationality of the mind and the
movement of the spirit. Our traditions
don’t even tell us we have to choose between God and Humanity. In our traditions, we are asked to bring all
our resources to bear in a religious quest, in what our Seven Principles calls
our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” a search that I take
to be important for myself and for all of us both individually and
collectively. If, in our search, we turn
off our rational minds and ignore the findings of science, then we are left
with speculation, superstition, and fantasy.
Conversely, when we make ‘spirit’ a bad word, then we ignore our human
intuition, our human imagination, and our human creativity. When we excise the word ‘God’ from our
communal vocabulary, then we needlessly limit our available ways of answering
questions of ultimacy like: Who are we?
Whose are we? Where do we come
from and where are we going? How should
we face death, and how can we be sure our lives will have been worth dying
for? How can we be saved or, in other
words, how can we attain spiritual wholeness and live lives befitting our
promise?
The ‘God’ debate continues among us, both here and in other congregations, as it continues in the public sphere. As practiced in the public sphere, the ‘God’ debate is too often - like our political debates - simply a sparring match between entrenched fundamentalists: religious fundamentalists vs. secular fundamentalists. When news outlets need talking heads that’ll boost ratings, they call on right-wing televangelists like Pat Robertson or James Dobson and anti-religionist writers like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. Such a polarized ‘discussion’ is hardly a prescription for what you might call a ‘fair and balanced’ debate and can’t help but shed far more heat than light on the subject.
Rev. Forrest Church speaks of this polarization this way: “Right-wing fundamentalists enshrine a tiny God on their altar. Fundamentalists of the left reject this tiny God, imagining that by so doing they have done something creative and important. Both groups are therefore in thralldom to the same tiny God.”
He goes on, “Some Unitarian Universalists employ God language; some do not… God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each. Call it what you will: spirit, ground of being, life itself; it remains what it always has–in Rudolph Otto’s definition of the Holy–a mysterium tremens et fascinans, an awe-inspiring mind-bending mystery.”
Further, the author says, by doing church and practicing community the way we do, “Unitarian Universalists do not reject religion; we extend its compass. That our orthodox neighbors should circumscribe wonder and meaning in too small a circle doesn’t force us to abandon wonder and suspend our search for meaning. On the contrary, we change our angle of vision (as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it). We expand our circle of inquiry.”
This place, this congregation, has changed. In Forrest Church’s words, we have “extended our compass” and “expanded our circle of inquiry.” This is no longer a place where language is limited to the simply secular and the purely rational. It has become a place where we can speak of the religious and the spiritual and the metaphysical without fear of reprisal or expulsion. You may lament that change or you may celebrate it, but the change itself says something about the nature of humanity in general: we have created something new here. I have, you have, we have. It is in our nature to create. The choices we make change things. When we make choices, we exercise power, and with that power we can open things up or we can close things down; we can open ourselves up and reach out to others, or we can close ourselves up and cut others off.
If it is in the nature of humanity to create and to change, then that says something about the nature of God as well. God, or Goddess, or the Universe, or the Oversoul, or the Ground of All Being - whatever you choose to call that which is larger than all and yet within all - this place, this world, this universe is changed by our choices, is changed by our changing. We are evolving together -we, and God, and Goddess, and the Universe. You could say we are co-creators with the powers of the Universe, co-creators with God.
When I stepped into the churches of Rome and Venice and Florence and all the little hilltowns of Tuscany and Umbria, and my eyes popped out and my head went back and my mouth dropped open, it was out of a sense of wonder and awe: wonder and awe that such things could be built by humans, wonder and awe that things built by humans could last so long, wonder and awe at the power we human beings have, wonder and awe at the power of the idea of God to motivate and inspire and bring out the best in humanity. I was looking at co-creation at its best.
When I regained my composure, in my more rational moments, I wondered at other things, too; I wondered at how often we don’t use the power we have wisely. Evil is done in the name of religion all the time. God’s name has been, is, and will continue to be used as a cover for the evil deeds of humanity, by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. But that is no reason, in my estimation, to give up on God or to give up on humanity.
I’ve had more than one person, upon seeing the title for today’s sermon, tell me that ‘God’ is not a four-letter word. And to that I say, well, good, let’s not treat it as such.
And I also say, there is a four-letter word that I think we ought to treat each other with more often: love.
So
may it be.