Credo

I believe in God the father, God the son, God the mother, God the daughter, God the brother, the sister, the aunt, the uncle, the son, the daughter, the grandparents and grandchildren. I believe in God the coworker, the neighbor, the teacher, the student, the babysitter, the friend; God the salesman, the plumber, the letter carrier, the weather forecaster, the insurance adjuster; God the farmer, the courier, the parking attendant, the janitor, the day laborer, the chief executive officer, the board member. I believe in God the autistic child, God the schizophrenic, God the Alzheimer’s sufferer, God the infant. I believe in God the in-laws, including the ones who can’t stand you, and God the neighbors who play their music too loud, and God the kid who broke into your car. I believe in God the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge, and even the corrections officer.
So it is true, sometimes I hate God, in the places where I find God, just as I sometimes hate living, being among human beings, being human, and sometimes I doubt that I am. But God is bigger than that, and these things do not worry me.
I believe in God present and tangible in the contacts and interactions that we have, as human beings, with one another. Even when we cannot see, when we choose not to, when the absence of God seems obvious, I believe that is where we are most likely and most able to see God.
I also believe that what I believe can be truthful without being actually true, like the stories about Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and Shiva. I believe that my most profound insights or imaginings are no more than attempts to image, or model, deity that defies human comprehension and words. I believe that God lies beyond metaphor and imagination, but also lies within them. I believe that my trying to know God is like a drop of water trying to comprehend the ocean.

Death and the materialist – 2. Conversations

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of my major influences. In his book No Death, No Fear, he makes use of an analogy that others have used, suggesting that after death, the energy continues like radio waves that we cannot receive. The absence of physical presence (the receiver) does not stop the transmission. It’s a crude metaphor with major flaws, but it made sense to me when I encountered it in the context of his discussion of non-self. We as individuals are not separate from everything else; we are manifest as our persons while conditions are sufficient, and cease to manifest when they are no longer sufficient. We are made up of things that were other things before, and will be other things later. There is unity, and it is a thing of which each of us is part. That unity continues after each of us ceases to be.
When my mother died in 2002, what I thought of as my mother was much larger than what lived in and through her body. She was all of the generations before, the events, the words, the interactions, the people, the places, the ideas that went before and around and through her. None of that stuff ends when a life ends. That’s what I hear in those inaudible radio transmissions. When the pear tree blooms, or the breeze picks up, or a leaf falls, I often think that some of that could be some of what was once my mother. I hear the signals. When we elected a Black President, when an Orthodox Rabbinical school admits a gay candidate, when I have the courage to apologize, when my friend gets a kidney transplant… I hear my mother. I don’t think you have to know my mother to understand what I am trying to say here, though I know I am expressing it badly. The point is that no person is contained entirely within a physical being; embodiment is essential to the person, but is not the whole person. Something real goes on — not something imaginary or whimsical or metaphysical, but really real.
It is easy to see how my Calvinist friend, or anyone else, would see the “radio wave” metaphor as presenting a dualist perspective. On its face, it sounds like someone is suggesting that an invisible, inaudible spirit leaves the body and remains with us in a non-physical existence. I can’t represent the Buddhist take on the symbolism, but to me it suggests quite the opposite. The person remains with us through integration into our physical lives, albeit in ways that aren’t always physical; it may be through influences on others, through chains of events, through inspiration and ideas, through the power of love that remains not just in the memory of the person, but in a much more substantive way.
My mother continues to influence my thinking and behavior. It is not the memory of her that does this, but the traces of her being on my self and others. It is a difficult distinction to make in words, particularly to someone who may be inclined not to see a distinction. Nonetheless, it is a very different thing from ‘spirit energy’ or a ‘reality beyond the present illusion’ of which I speak. It is real and physical. The dead remain with us, in ways that cannot be denied or dismissed.

Sermon: The first robin

delivered 1-11-2009, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett
Be sure to read the accompanying text below prior to the sermon

While most of the world is just getting over Christmas, this time of year is Advent for me.
I mean no disrespect for Jesus, whose birthday the whole world is supposedly celebrating. He is a guy from whom we could all learn a lot. He set an example that I hold up as an ideal of humanity. But there isn’t any historical evidence to suggest he was born at or around the time of the solstice; that’s an arbitrary date that had important advantages to those who followed the teachings of Jesus centuries ago. Furthermore, though it was not due to any shortcoming of his, humanity didn’t do much with the salvation that he offered.

Folks turned him into a “personal” messiah – a role not well supported in Christian scripture, but more comfortable for the church than the revolutionary message of a dramatically different and egalitarian social order in accordance with the desires and intent of his deity.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t a profound message of personal transformation and rebirth in his teachings, but it seems to me from what got recorded that he had much more than that in mind.  So this is one of the things that earns me the label of “heretic”: the celebration of Jesus’ birth seems to me to be a celebration of humanity’s lost opportunity and shirked responsibility.

Sermon: The first robin — scripture reading

The First Robin
Heywood Broun, 1941

“York, PA – With the temperature at 10 below zero, the first robin of the year was seen in York today. It was found dead on Penn Common.”

Call me an old sentimentalist if you will, but this seems to me the most tragic news note of the cold wave. I like people better than robins, and there has been widespread and agonizing suffering. But, you see, this was the first robin. He was by all odds the pioneer of his clan. He flew up from the South days, weeks and months before any reasonable robin weather was to be expected.

Sermon: Offend somebody

delivered on Memorial Day Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marietta
Be sure to read the accompanying text below prior to the sermon

Three points in the calendar remind me of my religious minority status – Christmas because I am a Unitarian, Easter because I am a Universalist, and Memorial Day because I am a pacifist. These days are not without meaning to me, but their meaning is not the same. This is an occasion to honor our departed heroes, but the heroes that call to me are not those who perished in mortal combat, but those who gave their lives in moral struggle. Those who were able to see beyond the boundaries of their own individual lives into the desperate need of human beings, who surrendered their lives not to preserve freedom for a nation, but to sanctify or recover or sustain the life and dignity of all people.

I mean no disrespect for the soldier. Though I cannot embrace that course as right or just for myself, I believe that all people must make choices that they find right or just in their own lives. I honor those choices. I do not deny the benefits I have derived from sacrifices in war. But we’ll honor them tomorrow, on the holiday.

Today, I want to consider the wisdom in the words of the prophet martin Luther King, Jr: “I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Sermon: Offend somebody — scripture reading

excerpted from Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny…
I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth…
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is… the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another‘s freedom… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection…

Sermon: Believing nonsense

delivered 12-14-2008, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett

Do you believe in God?

When people learn that I am UU, or simply that I do not share their Christian convictions, they often ask me that. Do you believe in God? I hate that question.

It’s not because I don’t like talking about it. I love talking about it. It’s not because I worry about my beliefs being very different from theirs. In fact, the more different we are, the more I love talking about it! There is just a certain shock value in telling a Jehovah’s Witness that I’m UU. I love to watch the look on their faces as they try to decide what to say next.

It’s not because I’m shy or uncertain or embarrassed, or any of the reasons that people usually hate to be asked a particular question. It’s that I really don’t know how to answer the question truthfully and accurately. Not that I don’t know the answer, exactly. Just that, well, there is no answer, exactly. I could say yes, or I could say no. Either response would be truthful, but misleading.

There is that awful problem with the word, God. For me as for many of us, it conjures a mental image of this mythological person, standing (or perhaps sitting) off in the distance somewhere, watching everything. Butting in where appropriate. Listening, answering, knowing, loving, but out there. No, I don’t believe in that. That doesn’t make sense to me, and it doesn’t fit with my experience of life.

Death and the materialist – 1. Foundation

I have a dear friend, very wise and insightful (notwithstanding his persistent Calvinist tendencies), who accuses me of gnosticism because I am a Unitarian Universalist.  It is clear he isn’t talking about gnosticism as the historical Christian heresy, but he does have a particular idea about what the word means. Since I don’t get it well enough to defend it, I won’t attempt to summarize it here. A key feature of it is a dualistic understanding of human experience, the soul separate from the body. That’s not me. Though I’m not excited about the shape of the particular material that makes me, I am thoroughly materialist.  That is, reality lies in the matter.

In what some may see as paradox, I do hold that our human experience is illusory.  That is, we live in an illusion of individuality, of separateness from one another. 

Systematic, shmystematic

I wonder why I remain so attached to systematic theology. Cognitively, I reject the concept as preposterous. How do you propose to construct a logical model of understanding something that lies so far beyond comprehension?  This isn’t physics we’re talking about, after all.

I have a few ideas about why the “science” of deity remains so close to my heart.  First, there is simply the reason why anybody would cling to systematic thinking: to make it all make sense.  Without structure and logic, it is chaos.  How can we talk about godness, or even think about it, without some framework.  I must be able to categorize, to evaluate, to comprehend.  Systematic theology gives us a common language so that we can disagree about things, and argue our points.  It lets us know that we are right.  That is terribly important.  Your ideas might be as good as mine, unless I can show logically that mine make sense and yours don’t.  That is not to say that we would ever discuss your ideas, or mine.  Systematic thinking simply allows me to have our conversations in my own mind, so that I can win.

There is another aspect to it, though, that may be even more compelling.  In being able to say what I believe in a logical and consistent manner, I can know what I don’t believe. 

Sermon: What’s in the Box?

First delivered on January 13, 2008

Unitarian Universalists, as often as not, define ourselves more by what we don’t believe than by what we hold true. The Christ, the inspired Word, the resurrection… When we consider how most of us came to be UU, it’s not surprising. We all have our stories, all different. But many are pretty much the same. We found ourselves in a place where people pointed to a book and said, that’s the truth. Believe it. No, we declared. My God doesn’t fit in your box.

So we left. Eventually, we got here. We pledged to honor diversity, to revere the quest for truth, to embrace the sacred wherever it is found. We made our own box. We each have one, and mine doesn’t have to look like yours, and it’s none of your business what I keep in mine. We respect each other’s beliefs, and we leave each other’s box alone. Everybody has a god; maybe found in the divine spark in each person, maybe in the way the seasons come and the trees grow and die and come again with wind and rain. Maybe it sounds like the god who spoke to Moses from the flame, or the god that led Mother Theresa to devote her life to suffering strangers when she wasn’t sure herself about god. Maybe we would stand with Martin Luther King, or Mohandas Gandhi, or Thich Nhat Hanh, or Elie Weisel, or Albert Schweitzer, or Thomas Jefferson, or all of these, or none. Here, it doesn’t matter where or with whom we stand.

Now, I’m at seminary, where that’s not so much true.