First Parish Unitarian UniversalistGod’s Silence
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
June 1, 2003
In my May 18th sermon for Diversity Days, I asked the people sitting in the pews to identify themselves by the religion (if any) of their childhoods and then by their current theological beliefs or, perhaps we should call them, “spiritual orientations.” Those of you who were here that day, or two and a half years ago when I led that exercise here for the first time, will remember that, for the second question, I listed and defined ten different theologies, plus None of the above or I don't know. And then, as I repeated the list, I asked you to stand for the definition or definitions that most closely resembled your beliefs.
Of course, I had a great view from up here of who stood when, but I hope that you looked around to see the wide range of beliefs represented among us. I hope that the exercise generated Coffee Hour conversations in which you learned more about each other and yourselves. I hope that it led you into further personal reflection, further musings about your “spiritual orientation.”
The categories were agnosticism, atheism, theism, pantheism, panentheism, earth-centered spirituality, humanism, spiritual humanism, transcendentalism, and process theology, which says that there is a cosmic creative process (that some might call “God”) that has brought everything into being.
If my memory serves me correctly, at least one person stood for each theological perspective. I recall that only one person stood for atheism, and when she did, I remembered fondly that Pat, a spirited and kind elder who died two years ago in February, would also have been standing for “atheism.” We are a theologically diverse group.
But, as I recall, the largest number of you stood for “spiritual humanism.” I suppose it is not surprising that your minister would also have stood for spiritual humanism, if not for the fact that I was already standing!
I say that I am a humanist because for me the buck stops here, with humans, for doing good and stopping evil, and that there is no “higher power” that will act in history or intervene in our lives to do it for us or to us. And I say I am a “spiritual” humanist because for me there is a spiritual dimension to life in which humans can participate that grounds us and gives us energy and hope, opens us to beauty, and connects us with each other in love. In that sense, for me, there is spiritual power that doesn’t exactly do good and stop evil with us, but at least helps out, and all the more so if we pay attention to it.
I’m not against calling that God, but I don’t tend to, myself. As a result, those of you who would stand for theism must sometimes feel dissatisfied in our worship, because the minister rarely invokes the name of God. In fact, two members left First Parish this year, people for whom a more traditional belief in God and an emphasis on the afterlife are important.
Worship here was not meeting their needs. Even though I do invite you into our time of meditation with words that I hope provide an opening for theists to enter into conversation with their God, even as others meditate or reflect, “let us now join our hearts and minds together in the spirit of prayer and meditation.”
On the other hand, a more expressly theistic worship experience might have driven away at least one of our newcomers this year who, it turns out, reads “Free Inquiry,” the publication of the secular humanists. I know that because he told me that a recent article in it that stated that the Reverend William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was “pushing to add belief in God to our seven UU Principles and Purposes.”
Now, that would be alarming! Not only would such a push alienate the spiritual humanists and atheists among us, it also flies in the face of our congregational polity, in which the congregations, not the president, make such changes.
Perhaps others of you read Free Inquiry, too, or saw Bill’s column in the March/April 2003 UUA magazine UU World, which is mailed to you if you sign our Membership Book, or read the Saturday, May 17th New York Times article headlined “A Heated Debate Flares in Unitarian Universalism.”
Poor President Sinkford. Turns out the controversy began when he was misquoted in a Fort Worth, Texas newspaper article after his January 12th sermon to our congregation there. The article began, "A former atheist who is now president of the Unitarian Universalist Association will push to put the word 'God' into a new statement of principles." Free Inquiry, and other publications, picked up the story.
Poor Bill. That’s not what he said to our friends in Fort Worth, but the misquote sure raised a hue and cry among UU’s around the country. The UU minister’s on-line chat was crackling with controversy for weeks!
What he did say was, and I quote,
“Our Principles [printed today and alternate Sundays on the back of your order of worship] serve us well as a covenant, presenting a vision of a more just world on which we agree and our promise to walk together toward that vision, whatever our theology. But I wonder whether the language of the Principles is sufficient to capture our individual searches for truth and meaning. For this [he says] I think we need what the Rev. David Bumbaugh, a Unitarian Universalist minister and religious humanist, calls a “vocabulary of reverence.” (UUWorld, March/April 2003, p. 9)
“Religious language” doesn’t have to mean “God talk.” And I'm not suggesting that Unitarian Universalism return to traditional Christian language. But I do feel that we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, to talk about human agency in theological terms--the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find to be of ultimate importance. (1/12/2003 sermon, “The Language of Faith,” as quoted in Sinkford email message to UU ministers in response to controversy).
I can clearly remember my first exposure to the Principles and Purposes. I probably already told you this story. But, not long after I had moved to Boston, a Presbyterian minister friend of mine in California asked me to buy a bumper sticker for her that she was pretty sure I could find at the UUA bookstore, at 25 Beacon Street next to the Statehouse, not far from where I worked at the time. So, I went on my lunch hour, bought the bumper sticker, and on my way out stopped to read a framed poster on the wall in the hall. It was a draft version of the seven principles later adopted by the 1985 and 86 UUA General Assemblies.
I remember standing there in that hallway, astounded: a religion gathered around a statement of ethics instead of a theological creed? A statement of ethics with which I agree, principles around which I am trying to live my life, and no religious language to put me off? I had married a UU and we’d been attending UU services since moving to Boston, but what was on this poster was news to me! This Unitarian Universalism is where I truly belong!
(Oh, and by the way, in case you are wondering, here’s what the bumper sticker said, “God is coming. And, boy, is she pissed!”)
But, now, we have President Bill Sinkford challenging us to include religious language in those Principles, the very kind of language the absence of which so excited me twenty years ago.
For him, a former atheist, God isn’t still coming, God has returned. So what I’m wondering is this, and if I ever got the opportunity, I’ll ask Bill: when God came back, was she pissed?
Being a former atheist, Bill does use “God talk.” But, he’s not urging us to do so, too. He’s just saying, as I hear him: let’s add “spiritual” to our “humanism.” Let’s acknowledge, to use my words, that there is a spiritual dimension to life in which humans can participate that grounds us and gives us energy and hope, opens us to beauty, and connects us with each other in love.
The President of the UUA hopes that the controversy over his being misquoted gets our attention and leads UU’s into dialogue about our movement’s foundational language. He hopes more of us will begin to express our faith using language like mine, which (to use his words) captures the possibility of reverence, names the holy, talks about the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find to be of ultimate importance, whether it is a traditional God-image that is of ultimate importance to us or not.
In her series of lectures published as When God is Silent, from which our reading this morning came, the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor took the long view of “God talk.” Working within the Judeo-Christian heritage, which is our UU heritage as well, she traces what I found to be a fascinating trajectory in relation to God’s speech. And, though she doesn’t mention us, I think it provides a context for understanding this recent controversy around the possible introduction of “religious language” into our UU Principles.
In the portion I chose for our reading, she develops an aspect of that trajectory: the idea that the God of the Bible—who began as the all-powerful divine creator who brought forth life from a void of nothingness, punished his creation with floods and famines, and rewarded the faithful with great miracles of land and sea—that that God receded over time to a mere whisper in the simple (though profound) stories and, by comparison, minor miracles of Jesus (p. 57)
Over the 2000 years since, the “mere whisper” was sometimes drowned out by the Christian Church’s subsequent myths, creeds, dogmas and doctrines, even if they may originally have been intended to only amplify the whisper. These amplifications don’t meet the test of reason or tug at the heartstrings of many of us gathered here, so it is no wonder that we don’t care to associate whatever direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder we do have with that Biblical God.
That’s why so many of us are reticent about God, if not dismissive. That’s why many of us call ourselves agnostics, atheists, pantheists, panentheists, practitioners of earth-centered spirituality, humanists, spiritual humanists, transcendentalists, and cosmic creative process-types. Many of us gave up on traditional “God talk.”
But, we do experience transcending mystery and wonder. We do experience a spiritual dimension to life that grounds us and gives us energy and hope, opens us to beauty, and connects us with each other in love. In that sense, “God” is not quite so silent. That’s what Sinkford wants us to more readily express.
Barbara Brown Taylor develops another aspect of the trajectory in relation to God’s speech. She says that the central command of Judaism was, and is, to listen, to listen for God’s speech. She reminds us that the primary declaration of the Hebrew faith is “Hear, O Israel.” (50).
For Christians, though, she says the central command is to speak, to speak God’s words. That’s what the post-resurrection Jesus said to his disciples, “make disciples, teach, proclaim.” That instruction to proclaim is what led to the creeds, doctrines and dogmas, you see. Taylor says, “What [the early Christians] said they believed about God could get them killed, but saying it was so important to them that many of them willingly chose death over silence. As time went on, they compressed what they believed into a short version they could say together, and later they took their turns killing people who tried to say anything different about God.”(49)
So, if the Jews are to “Listen to God’s word” and the Christians are to “Proclaim God’s word,” what are we to do, coming out of that same tradition? What comes next in the trajectory in relation to God’s speech?
I read Taylor’s essays in preparation for my most recent UU minister’s study group session. In our discussion, we agreed that if rabbis say “Hear” and Christian preachers say “Proclaim,” we say, “Do.”
Exactly. We UU’s are to do God’s word. That’s what our Principles say: go do. Don’t just listen, don’t just speak—DO! We affirm and promote—by our actions—the seven principles around which UU congregations covenanted back in the mid 1980’s, today printed on the back of your order of worship.
Exactly. And, I had to recognize, as I am sure you do too, how often my sermons end with a call to some kind of action, whether personal or public.
Will we be distracted from acting on our principles if we start engaging in dialogue about the language of reverence? I hope not. It’s not inevitable. Yet, I feel tempted to do just that, to retreat from the world’s problems right now, do you? They seem to be mounting, no matter which way you turn.
But I must ask myself, how shall I feel when future generations say of us, “and what were they doing back then, just after the turn of the century when things were such a mess, discoursing about the language of reverence???!!”
A little reverence would be helpful right now, though, and a little humility, a little joy. These are among the spiritual dimensions of life, and we need them, perhaps especially now. If we participate in them, they will open us to beauty, connect us with each other in love, ground us and give us energy and hope. I have a hunch that the more we participate in the spiritual dimensions of life, the better we’ll do what we do.
Amen.