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Hymns: Opening:
Praise be to God, the Almighty, #278
Closing: Now Thank we all our God, #32
Reading: Love one another, #639
Reading: “I
believe in God”
 od is difficult
for us UU’s to talk about. We see with so many different lenses.
There have been so many images of God, of the ultimate, the symbol of the
creation of the universe, of life, of death across history. So many ways
to see him or her or it, depending on the culture, on the time.
Most of us grew up with the idea of God “out there.” Duality. The kind old
gray haired man living in heaven taking care of us. What Matt Fox calls
the evil visited upon us. Duality means WE are not responsible, big ole
God out there is. And that we are not sacred or holy, only God is.
Many other religions have always seen God as inside each human, inside
every fiber of being in the universe, wakan. The great gift of other
faiths and indigenous traditions to us is this more integrated way of
experiencing God…..right here, now, in everyone of us.
No matter what others have believed or taught, the bottom line is that God
is what each of our experiences tell us she is.
God is made of experience, each of our life experience. There are many of
us here who have had an ambivalent or even hostile experience with God.
There are others here who are settled into a loving relationship with God.
Some of you do not believe in the existence of a Higher Power at all no
matter what form in which it is packaged. Some of us owe our very lives to
God.
Many of us have been pressed into a small rigid box of belief in the past
that is not spacious enough for anyone’s spirit to fit. After such
experience many of us, naturally, withdrew from God.
Some of us were abused in the name of God.
Anger, atheism, and a keen desire to never attend a church for the rest of
our lives followed that experience.
It has been tough for progressives to find God in the traditional church.
The institutional Christian church, as it has been constructed from 325 AD
on, has piled required belief, dogmatic rules, and unimaginable
hierarchical judgments that have led to the complete alienation of millions
in the West from our mother religion.
But more to the point, more damaging, is the truth of who or what God is
has been obscured, therefore losing him/her from our own lives. We have
thrown the real and loving God inside us out with the Almighty bathwater.
It makes sense that many of us have thrown out the God of our youth. It is
a souring betrayal to have the innocence of childhood belief pounded out
of us through imperfect human experience. For it is imperfect humans who
abused us or put us into rigid boxes, in the NAME of God. It is a loss
beyond the capacity of language to convey, to lose the deep sense of awe
and mystery, radiant love, and the experience of meaningful connection to
the Divine that comes with youthful, innocent faith in God. To lose that
sense of awe, childlike wonder and excitement about what the universe
offers us each day is to create the potential of entering spiritual
emptiness, cynicism, and disconnection from life’s highest values and
deepest mysteries as an adult. It can obscure the pregnant possibility
that God is an integral, intimate part of us, whether we see him or not.
Through surveys by the UUA, it would seem that most UU’s who believe in
any form of God, believe that God is a creative spirit who mysteriously
began the universe, who set physical laws in motion. Close to the Hindu
idea of Brahman, the ground of being. There are few UU’s who would support
the belief that she/he is looking over our shoulders, guiding our life’s
journey, intervening in our lives when we need it. Yet, perhaps it is so.
Roughly 90% of the people in our broader culture believe that it is true.
There are growing numbers who see God through indigenous eyes, seeing
him/her as the glue of the universe, present in all things, the Great
Spirit holding us together in meaningful, holy relationship with the
cosmos and each other. Bringing us all into relationship with each other
as part of God…mitakuye oyasin, we are all related.
No less a scientific thinker than Albert Einstein said, “either everything
in the universe is a miracle, or nothing is.” It was he who also commented
that the more he studied the make-up of the universe, the more he saw the
presence of a guiding hand.
These two sources, the mystical experience of indigenous peoples and the
insights of physics into the nature of the universe have given us, at
least, a language and a way to talk about the existence/non-existence of
God without having to depend on the old language and frozen concepts of
Christianity.
So today, what do I say to the question, “What is God?”
Today, I would say that God is:
Love.
The beginning and the end
Here. Now.
Wrapped around me, and you.
My breath. The air we breath.
All beauty. All ugliness.
The great mystery of mysteries.
The sunrise and the sunset, the day, the night.
The voice of compassion inside my mind.
My parent, my brother, my sister. All colors. All hues.
Awesome. Beyond imagination.
She listens.
Has loved me since before the beginning.
Community Sharing and
Quotes
It is good to talk about ultimate things together. It is good to be in a
spiritual community together where we can talk and share about our
ultimate values.
What is most important for this ongoing sharing is that each of us respect
and honor what every other person holds as their truth in this community.
There is NO right way or wrong way to believe. Each of us has our
experience of God, or non-God. That experience is of great value, and it
is not THE TRUTH. For those of us who experience God, that is our truth.
For those of you who do not, that is a great and valuable truth that
guides you in rich and valuable ways. May we continue to be peacefully on
the journey together.
QUOTES
Either God is everything, or there is no God. If God is, God is. If God
isn’t, God isn’t. Your beliefs do not determine what is and what isn’t.
-- Ron Smotherman
We learn that God is, that He is in me, and that all things are shadows of
Him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God.
-- Ralph
Waldo Emerson
We give God the name of good. It is only by shortening it that it becomes
God. -- Henry Ward Beecher
I could no say I believe. I know. I have had the experience of being
gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people
call God.
-- Carl Jung
God is concealed from the mind, but revealed in the heart.
-- Anonymous
We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is….
-- Augustine
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
-- Thomas Paine
When people are loving, brave, truthful, charitable, God is present.
-- Harold Kushner
God to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
-- Buckminster
Fuller
I gave in and admitted that God is God. (upon relinquishing atheism)
-- C.S.
Lewis
Belief in God is acceptance of the basic principle that the universe makes
sense, that there is behind it an ultimate purpose. -- Carl W. Miller
An idea about God is not God.
-- Leo Tolstoy
God is the greatest democrat the world knows, for He leaves us free to
make our own choice between good and evil. --
Mahatma Gandhi
When asked where God is, people point towards the sky or some far distant
region….that is why He is not manifesting Himself. Realize that He is in
you, with you , behind you, before you, and all around you, and He can be
seen and felt everywhere. -- Sathya Sai Baba
God is a superior reasoning power…revealed in the incomprehensible
universe. -- Albert Einstein
God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in
humans. -- Sanskrit saying
The odds against a universe like ours coming out of something like the Big
Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.
-- Stephen Hawking
I hold that when we take a view of the Universe, its parts general or
particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a
conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom
of it’s composition. It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to
believe that there is a fabricator of all things. Of the nature of this
being, God, we know nothing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present, one, and not
compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is in space and time,
but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore that spirit, that is ,
the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth
through us.
--
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather. All over the earth the faces
of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of
the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number and with
children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good
road to the day of quiet. -- Black Elk
A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to
this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that
journey. The question is not whether the things that happen to you are
chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once.
There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak…even the walk from
the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before,
even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all
anywhere. God speaks and the words are incarnate in the flesh and blood of
our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys.
--
Fredrick Buechner
Charles Townes, Inventor of the laser. 1964 Nobel Prize:
In a 1996 interview with The Times, Townes said that new findings in
astronomy had opened people's minds to religion. Before the 1960s, the Big
Bang was just an idea that was hotly debated. Today, there is so much
evidence supporting the theory that most cosmologists take it for granted.
"The fact that the universe had a beginning is a very striking thing,"
Townes said. "How do you explain that unique event" without God?
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