"The G Word"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 11^th of February, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to worship, to claim with simple joy
that we are not the center of the universe,
and to recognize our humble part
in the family of things.

Here we dare to approach the depths and heights
rather than the superficial and merely comfortable.
Let music, silence and word lift hearts and minds

And (assembly) may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we may together become…

Thanksgiving Ceremony [Next] [back to top]

Mark Belletini:

Every community of spirit in this world, which grows confident enough to speak to the world of reason, passion, peace and love,does so because its members practice these virtues among themselves.

Wendy Fish:

Giving thanks, and celebrating each other is one of the ways we practice our faith. On the Sunday closest to Valentine's Day, we thank and celebrate our teachers and educators, those who find ways to lead us to deepening understanding and wider wisdom. They offer us knowledge too, knowledge that both challenges us, and roots us in our heritage and potential. Will you join me in reading the thanksgiving reading on your yellow inserts.

Words of the Congregation:

Affirming that the only thing better than a good education is more good education; knowing that learning how to live with reasoning, loving spirits in a diverse and wondrous and tough world is a joy as great as love itself, we thank you all for opening the gate to such joy. Blest are those who dare to teach and blest are those who dare to learn.

Preface to the Great Silence [Next] [back to top]

Ah, Love,
the world goes on as it has always gone on,
a few surprisingly warm days, a few cold,
and a slash of driving rain;
fearful tensions and elections
in other parts of the world
and economic ups and downs
on this side of the Atlantic puddle.

Ah love,
the world goes on as it has always gone on.
Work and layoffs, surprises and disappointments,
boredom and excitement, loneliness and friendships,
loss and celebration, worry and gladness.
Chores in the morning, daydreams in the afternoon,
meetings at night, and then sleep, either deep or fitful, during the shorter and shorter nights.

Ah love,
the world goes on as it has always gone on.
Habits and trends, the usual conformity.
But ah, see, there's just a little awareness
here and there to break the molds, to turn the wheel,
to shape the clay, to lure the rosebud to blossom,
to cry out from the center of deep silence:

"Somewhere or other there must surely
be the face not seen, the voice not heard,
far or near, past land or sea,"
a thin, lean silence which asks the world
to move on past the way it has always gone,
and to come a little closer,
just a bit closer, to you, oh Love. (bellsound)

Holding compassion to be the very announcement of love in the world, we set aside a moment at the very center of our worship to render our connections, each to each, vivid for a moment. This we do by remembering those who grieve, those who celebrate, those who are sick, recovering or feeling defeated, and all those remarkable teachers in our lives, who, by their presence (whether they understood themselves as teachers or not) have made us who we are. We embrace these people now, and welcome them into this time, by naming them aloud or silently within.

(naming)

Somewhere or other, maybe it's here, could it be?
The songs of love are still being sung,
and all the conformities of the world fall away for a time,
and we arrive here at last, free to be ourselves
and free to love more today than yesterday.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]

is an ancient reading from the Scroll of Melakim, called the Book of Kings in the English Bible. As I often do, I will leave the names in Hebrew, so you can come to this story, if you are familiar with the English version of this famous story, with a fresh heart. It dates back 2700 years we think. The famous Hebrew phrase, rendered in the King James as "still, small voice" is rendered here in the more precise and accurate meaning of the Hebrew.

Now when Ahav told Yezivel all that Eliyah had done, and how he and his band had killed all the religious leaders by the sword, Yezivel sent a messenger to Eliyah with the following message:

"As surely as your name is Eliyah and mine is Yezivel, may God damn me and worse if by tomorrow night you are not just as dead as the religious leaders you killed."

This message terrified Eliyah, and so he fled to the South, into the territory of Beersheva. He came eventually to Horev, which is often called God's mountain. Eliyah found a cave there and took it as his abode. The Eternal's word came to him, "Whatever are you doing here, Eliyah?"

"I have been very devout," said Eliyah, "all for You, Eternal. Everyone else in the land has broken their covenant with you, and assassinated all of your followers. I am the only one left. And now they are after me."

The Eternal said to him: "Go outside your cave and stand on the slope of the great mountain as I come to you."

Now see? The Eternal did indeed flow toward Eliyah. A terrible windstorm wreaked havoc on the mountain, blowing boulders about and smashing them. But the Eternal was not to be found in the wind. After the wind, the whole mountain shook, and an earthquake trembled under him, but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. And then a great fire climbed the mountain slope, but the Eternal was not in the fire. And, after the fire, there came the sound of a lean, lean silence, which said to him "Return home…"

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]

comes from the well-known book The Color Purple, by Alice Walker but it's not the most often- quoted passage from that book.

Ain't no way to read the Bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest.

The Third Reading [Next] [back to top]

comes from the poetic prose writings of a man famous for his poetry, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote this lyrical passage in 1898, in a book called "The Uncalled.

Poor conceited humanity! Interpreters of God indeed.

We reduce the deity to vulgar fractions. We place our own little ambitions and label them "divine messages." With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity.

Sermon: The G Word [Next] [back to top]

First, a story to get things cooking. A few of you at least have heard me tell this story at other gatherings.

When I was named Chair of the Hymnbook Commission, I naturally took it on myself to figure out what I had got myself into. I started by interviewing all the living members of the former Hymnbook Commission, back in the late 1950's. People like Chris Moore of Chicago Children's Choir fame, and Elaine Bays, and the late Arthur Foote, and the inimitable Ken Patton.

Ken Patton was an amazing man. A Universalist minister of keen intellect and creative bent, he was one of the finest hymn-writers of the last century.

The excellence of his experimental worship services at the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston still inform almost all present Unitarian Universalist worship, including here. When I conduct a wedding, as I did a week ago, I use the ceremony of the cup which he perfected. When I do a memorial service, as I did yesterday, I base much of my tone on his foundational work.

Ken Patton was also famous for being…well… opinionated and somewhat cranky when he expressed himself. He labeled himself a religious, or even mystical Humanist. But he often told people with his gruff voice that he was an "atheist." This, you may well observe, made him lots of fun at local Boston Interfaith meetings.

I called him to arrange a lunch meeting with him at our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly one year, when the Meeting was held in Rochester, New York.

Just before our scheduled lunch, Patton was given a Life-Time Achievement award from the UUA at a plenary session with thousands of people present. During this speech, he sounded so arrogant and cranky that many of the people in the seats got up and left, and many tittered nervously, embarrassed, I suppose, on his behalf. He said something like this: "I am the only man of Humanist conviction left in this movement of ours. Everyone else believes nonsense these days. Reason has gone out the window, and people speak of all sorts of superstitions as if they were fact. I'm disgusted with the way our once great movement of reasonable religion has deteriorated into a carnival of irrational beliefs."

However, after his little tirade, he began to speak more autobiographically for a moment. He spoke of his time on the mid-century Hymnbook Commission. He mentioned two members of the commission on which he sat, in particular, the late Vincent Silliman and the late Arthur Foote. As he spoke their names, telling us all how much they meant to him, I saw his eyes glisten with tears, and want you to know I saw this a full 13 rows away. That's when I knew in my heart his bluster and swagger were not the whole of him. The man was pulsing with love and tenderness on the inside.

So when it was time for lunch, Ken met me at the appointed place. No one else was speaking to him. They walked past him as if he wasn't there. When I moved toward him, he said crustily, "Ah, you must be Belletini. So what are you anyway?"

"What are you?" I thought. Strange greeting. But back in Detroit when I was a child, that actually was a real and ordinary question. It meant "What is your precise ethnicity?" So I answered him, "What am I? Italian-American. My four grandparents all came from the province of Emilia."

"Oh, I know that," he snapped. "I know Belletini is an Italian name. I'm not stupid. What I mean is, are you an atheist, or are you not?"

Now this made me mad. As many of you know, I am not terribly fond of categories and the foolish human game of pigeonholing people into tidy little boxes. So I snapped back with all the crustiness and arrogance I could muster.

"Oh Ken, the word 'atheism,' just like the word 'agnostic' and the word 'theist' for that matter, are all nineteenth century words. They only refer to each other and nothing else. I refuse to use any of those words. Besides, it's almost the 21st century. Surely we can give up using and debating those tired and old-fashioned words and get on with living life, can't we?"

My impulsive tactic of meeting crankiness with equal crankiness seems to have worked. Ken and I started at that very moment to have a very real conversation, on the way to lunch, and over lunch. We told our stories, told of our frustrations and satisfactions with ministry, and the drama of our personal relationships. We spoke of our sense of failure and success. We spoke of our interest in painting and all the arts, and of our love for the English language. We spoke, I'd venture to say, as tenderly as two people who met so recently ever could be tender. And we did it all without categories. We simply told the stories of our lives. And we told the truth, too.

Now some visitors to our congregations are horrified when they find out that many Unitarian Universalists, though they assemble at a place called a church, often have difficulty with the word "God." When people hear some Unitarian Universalists calling themselves agnostics or even, like Ken Patton, atheists, they begin to ask "But why go to church at all then if you don't believe in God?"

The answer to this question (certainly a bit naïve but hardly silly considering modern American religious culture) is often to roll the eyes and offer a little lecture: "Religion doesn't have to do with worshipping a God someplace, but with treating each other with respect and love here on earth."

But then there are those Unitarian Universalists who feel very put upon by the Ken Patton types, those who are proud to stand in the two thousand year old tradition of Unitarian and Universalist theism. Our tradition across the centuries affirmed a single Spirit, called God, even though this God was often spoken of cautiously, carefully and not even always as a person. Theists in our congregations often tell me they feel that the skeptical types censor and ridicule their theology, or worse, look down on them as being still stuck in the past. They sometimes feel subtly pushed to the edge of the community, which neither succeeds in really including them or even welcoming them very much.

I think that these tensions are real. In every church I have ever served or even visited, I have seen evidence of this tension. Now since I'm not convinced that the feeling of being pushed to the edge of things can possibly be very gratifying; and, since I am equally convinced that feeling a bit superior to other members of the congregation who find God a deeply meaningful word is not one whit more gratifying, I think I need to speak a bit about this ancient word, the G-Word, God.

First, I am well aware that several billions in the world do not use the word God (in any of its forms…goddess, gods, or God), and that several billions do. That means that any Unitarian Universalist Church is not a strange thing at all, but rather an authentic microcosm of the world.

Second, I want to make clear what I have learned by being a minister for 22 years now. The god that some people disbelieve in is clearly not the god others believe in. And therein lies the rub.

Some folks talk about not believing in the white haired old man in the sky. Fortunately, most adult Presbyterians I know don't believe in such a God either, and it's a calumny to suggest they do. Religious education that does not go further than 5th grade is not religious education. A fatherly God in the sky is a concrete image for 3rd grade Sunday School; it was never meant to be the final image for educated adults.

But there is more to say. Many children who grow up Unitarian Universalist and then go to seminary to become ministers are often shocked at how many images for God there are that they have never heard of. They hear about Spinoza, who used the words God and Universe inter-changeably. They hear quotations from Joe Pintauro the poet, who said, "To believe in God is to believe that something somewhere is not stupid." They hear feminist theorists in Christian seminary classes who quote people like hattie gossett: "if there has to be a god, then it is a committee of women dedicated to wiping out earthly oppression." Or they hear that the psychologist Carl Jung, when asked on his deathbed about God, said that God is whatever crosses the path of his life that he cannot walk around. Or they take courses from the tempestuous Mary Daly in Boston who asked in one of her earliest and least radical books: "Why must God be a noun, why not a verb, the most active and dynamic of all?" They read Paul Tillich, who spoke of God as the Ground of All Being, or our Ultimate Concern. Then they read the process theology books of the late Unitarian Universalist theologian Charles Hartshorne, who speaks of God as the growing force for good in the world. They may read the profound theological wrestlings of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, as I did, every word, or Henry Nelson Wieman, who speaks of God as "creative interchange." (By his definition, Ken Patton and I were engulfed in God as we spoke to each other of our real lives, our real hopes and dreams and failures and joys). After the theologians, they may turn to the poets. They may read the poems of the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi, who spoke of God by speaking of his rapturous love for the teacher Shams, and the Light, or the incandescent theological poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…" God's "the dearest freshness deep down things."

These luminous and new understandings stun many Unitarian Universalist seminarians. They realize that theology may not be reducible to simple either/or conceptions like a binary computer program…you know, either there is a God or there isn't. This is because there are a thousand definitions for God, and no possible way to scour the language we speak in order to make that not be true.

But the stories of religious wounding and hurt are also real. Sometimes the folks who find God language helpful are unable to appreciate the deep distortions that certain fundamentalist religious approaches make in the soul. In such a world, there is a binary code. You know, heaven and hell, the saved and the damned, the just and the unjust, Holy God and sinful humanity. When raised in such an either/or system, it may well be that the only possible salvation for the spirit is to throw all of the bloody double words into the waste basket. This is to say nothing of the famous historical cruelties perpetrated in the name of God…the executions and crusades, the burning of heretics and the maiming of the spirits of little children by telling them that they are not now and should never be sexual beings.

But it's important not to be smug here, or self-righteous. People who have rejected God can hurt the world just as much as those who proclaim some sort of God. Stalin rejected the God of his Orthodox seminary training, and yet millions died by his decree. Pol Pot had no use for God, but he deliberately set out to wipe out the middle class in Cambodia one family at a time, and you know what? He succeeded.

No, sorry, sorry, it's just too easy to hide behind the murderous or greedy nature of some God-believers. Some non-theists are, unfortunately, just as bloody.

But this does not surprise me. You see, I am convinced its not belief or disbelief in some God (however defined) that is the problem. No, it's true and unquestioning belief in anything that is the problem. Certainty instead of the far more uncertain quest for truth. The preachers of Crusades believed with their whole heart they were right. Stalin believed with his whole heart he was right to do what he did. The first were certain because of their beliefs in their God, the second was convinced that his atheism was the only real foundation on which to build his programs. Their inability to question their true belief lead, as it often does, to disaster.

In the first reading this morning, the legendary prophet Eliyah is running for his life. Not a bad thing to do when you have just killed hundreds of people because you think God told you to do that. Eliyah is hardly a choir boy. He is caught up with being right, like the Crusaders, like Stalin, so right he thinks he can kill those he believes are wrong, the worshippers of idols. He is caught up with worshipping power and control. He will shape the world according to his own self-righteousness. He thinks he is his God's own earthquake, sent to shake things up. He thinks he is his God's own whirlwind, sent to uproot terrible things. He thinks he is his God's own fire, sent to burn up the lies of the world. But then he has his experience at the edge of the cave. He learns that not only has he been heeding a false and murderous voice, the voice of his own self-righteousness. He learns also that he has been wrong about his God, who is not to be found in the power of fires, winds or earthquakes, but rather in the quiet sound of a lean, lean silence. Not just silence, mind you, but a lean, lean silence, the Hebrew says, something more silent than silence.

This new understanding of God does not tell him he was wrong about the idols…to worship any mere limited thing…and say it is the Ultimate, or God, is still inhumane. To worship power, or control, or prestige, or self, or technology, or a party, or a nation, or a flag, or a way of life, or even your own theology is still idolatrous worship. It is still something that does not contribute one whit to human dignity, human worth, or human community.

But Eliyah also learns that worshipping any voice that tells him to murder is just as wrong. As the poet Dunbar reminds us, we worship "vulgar fractions" and call them "the whole" or worse, The Holy. We small, limited creatures, with our "short sight," think we can see to the end of things, but we are fooling ourselves. I agree.

My dear and most talented friend Kevin painted himself as Eliyah in this painting, a meditation of the story you heard this morning. Not surprising. Our understanding of God, or our understanding of our atheism, or our agnosticism is our own understanding, based on our own life stories. We always see the world through our own faces.

But Kevin was freely exploring himself in painting this meditation on the story of Eliyah. He did so willingly and with joy. When images of God come to us without our own lives' consent, it presents a different problem. For example, when the black woman in the novel The Color Purple is told that God is white and a man, she "lost interest." Of course. What does a white man have to do with her life? Why wouldn't atheism be the only humane response to such a god?

You see how complicated it gets. And I for one have never understood the benefits of cowardly hiding behind the phrase "It's all very simple, you know." Its not simple. I don't imagine for one minute that this sermon even touches a millionth of the issues that come up in people when the word God is brought up.

But it is a beginning. For those who are interested in our own religious history about God, I have put out in the gallery, a few copies of the paper on Unitarian Universalists and God I wrote at the request of our Czech Unitarian brothers and sisters in Prague. But you need to know that, in the end, I am convinced that our discussion about "God" is not an intellectual issue at all.

You see, when I spoke to Ken Patton and told him I don't call myself either an atheist, theist or agnostic, I didn't mean I don't ever use those words. I just meant that I only use them together, and never, never apart. You see I am an atheist in so far as I reject all human images and metaphors for Ultimate Reality as being merely partial, "vulgar fractions," in Dunbar's great phrase. I do not believe in any Gods that root for particular countries, clothe politicians in sanctity, or urge death upon non-believers. Any such God is human greed and selfishness written in larger letters. With Eliyah of old, I say, knock all such Gods off their elevated shelves. I have no use for supposedly omnipotent Gods who do nothing when children suffer. And I have no use for Gods disguised as Fate or inevitability, or Gods that swagger, pose, command, punish or humiliate. I don't believe in cue-stick Gods playing with the lives of innocent people like they were so many 8 balls. And I don't believe in Evangelical Gods who bully, threaten hellfire and demand suburban conformity.

But I am more than an atheist. I am an agnostic in the sense that I don't believe that anything that human beings can say has even a chance of being final or clear. After all, we are part and parcel of the universe. We don't stand outside it. We don't stand still within it, but move and flow with everything else, a brilliance of atoms and empty space moving through a brilliance of atoms and empty space that is the mysterious cosmos. Uncertainty is the only certainty.

"Give me a place to stand and a lever, and I shall move the world," Arkhimedes the Greek philosopher supposedly said. Ah, but there is no place where you can stand, no place that does not also move.

Thus all human knowledge is provisional, and so I am an agnostic.

But I am more than an agnostic. I am a true theist in the sense that I believe with all my heart that love is always better than hate, no exceptions; that compassion is always better than revenge, no exceptions; that telling the truth is always better than stretching it, perverting it, denying it or disguising it. I think the vector of the Holy goes one way and one way only, toward love and compassion for all, toward ever emerging truth. Please don't ask me if I believe there is "a God" someplace…that would make God one Great Thing among littler things, and thus, only another limited, although very large, idol. Please don't ask me if God exists outside human relationships, for as a human being, I can only speak about those relationships. I cannot speak of God within a stone, since I am not a stone. I don't want to try to literalize God too much…there is so much danger of idolatry in that, of worshipping a thing instead of the whole. Like many devout Jews, I rarely even use the word God in itself. I do take a certain comfort in the assertion found, the Gospel of John, that God is Love and that love is ultimate, our end, and also the best means for getting to that end. I am a theist because I believe that love is not an abstraction, but deeply personal, and something that transcends biology and hormonal urges. Gandhi taught me that. And Martin Luther King. And Jesus. And a few thousand other amazing people who loved life and people more than they were afraid of death. I am a theist because I know that I myself am most assuredly not ultimate, not final, not God.

In the end, I think that almost all theology is also an elegant form of autobiography. Ken Patton and I figured that out across lunch, I think. And so does the poet David Whyte, with whose poem, called "Self-Portrait," I will conclude this sermon:

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong, or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods talk of God."

Prayer [back to top]

Love, Keep me faithful to emerging truth.
Don't let me hide behind certainty or ease.
Undermine my cowardice about loving.
Unwrap my praise, and day by day peel away my distinct capacity for arrogance.
Let my life blossom slowly like a rose in spring.
Help me to unlearn everything vulgar and fractional
so that I might have room inside me for you.
Gloria.

[back to top]

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