Is
There Enough God Here?
Rev.
Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
8/12/07
“There
is a little plant called reverence in the corner
of my soul’s garden, which I love to have
watered once a week.” –Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Unitarian professor, physician and
author (1809-1894)
UU
Minute
This
year, First Unitarian celebrates our 130th
year as a church community. As part of
that celebration, we will take a moment each
week to remind, or perhaps introduce, us to
Unitarians and Universalists from our shared
history. Today’s remembrance of Mary
Safford has been written by member Dorothy
Ramsey.
Born to Presbyterian Illinois farmers 15 years
before the start of the Civil War, Mary
Augusta Safford grew to be a Johnny
Appleseed of sorts to the Unitarian movement in
the Midwest, founding and serving churches in
Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, North and South
Dakota before retiring to Orlando, Florida where
she founded one more church! So much for
retirement!!
As the central figure of what came to be known
as the Iowa Sisterhood, Mary was a force for
liberal religions tradition. In 1871, she
founded the Hawthorne Literary Society, a forum
for sharing new ideas. Oscar Clute,
a Unitarian minister just across the river in
Iowa, was one of the group’s favorite
speakers. His lecture, “The
Evolution of Religion” created quite a
stir. He provided the support Mary
Safford and Eleanor Gordon, lifelong friends,
needed to start their first church in
Hamilton. By the spring of 1879, they were
planning public worship services! From
there to Humbolt, Iowa, to Sioux City to Des
Moines, where she served from 1889 to
1910.
Her mantra, “Lengthen the cord and strengthen
the stakes,” guided her efforts to share her
belief that "true religion must first of
all be 'free' religion, free from irrational
dogma that discouraged personal growth."
She held that the human soul would evolve, not
in solitude but, through community. People would
make their common tasks divine "by doing
them in the spirit of love and
helpfulness."
We call the back of this auditorium the Mary
Safford Room. She was our minister for 21
of her 70 years. Although she has been
dead for 80 years, her lessons endure through
the many churches she served throughout the
Midwest, including ours.
Meditation
“No,
I Would Not Leave You If You Suddenly Found God”
by
Jennifer Michael Hecht
from The Next Ancient World
Praise wild dancing in the kitchen.
Praise sitting and talking to the doctor.
Praise phone calls from my sister.
Praise phone calls from you, a little drunk,
leaning toward me.
Praise old lovers who show up when they are
needed.
Praise our mothers, safe in another state.
Praise my apartment with its three wide rooms.
Praise the blue sky above the brick buildings.
Praise my back windows: trees, fire escapes,
cafe lights.
Praise coffee (it destroys sadness).
Praise encyclopedias.
Praise you calling crying.
Praise ibuprofen.
Praise painting on wood.
Praise all the days in the photographs.
Praise the press of my breasts against the
inside of my winter coat.
Praise the name of my winter coat: Big Black.
Praise this feeling of trying to write about the
truth.
Praise the Byzantine Empire.
Praise the salt in sweat. We are not alone.
Praise making you laugh.
Praise making you proud.
Praise the second cup of coffee.
Praise having a party to go to tonight.
Praise my halting therapist.
Praise mixed baby lettuce.
Praise my confidence.
Praise my talent.
Praise bravery in the face of fear.
Praise my fearlessness.
Praise my fear.
Praise pickled herring with onions.
Praise the Arctic Circle.
Praise the Mighty Tonka truck.
Praise the forklift; praise the crane.
Praise theater tickets.
Praise the repetition of names.
Praise the Virgin.
Praise the Magdalene.
Praise Magellan.
Praise Central Park.
Praise your uneven teeth.
Praise blood-stained sheets.
Praise the land, and what I know about its
bedrock.
Praise David, dancing wild around the ark of his
Lord.
Praise the job of work of truth.
Praise the phrase "job of work."
Praise your faith in me.
Praise your courage.
Praise my faithfulness.
Praise my dedication.
Praise that you sleep with one eye open because
a dog bit your face.
Praise your extra nipple.
Praise that we are not lovers.
Praise that we touch each other like lovers.
Praise that you figure out the movie before me.
Praise my desperation.
Praise my terrible fear.
Praise Jones Beach.
Praise the boys in long pants selling frozen
Snickers at the sea shore.
Praise death.
Praise the memory of being tiny and tumbled
under the ocean, close
to death. Praise arch support.
Praise chewing on a steak bone.
Praise other people's poems.
Praise the Empire State Building.
Praise swimming out so far, I forget the fact of
land.
Praise eating chicken-cutlet sandwiches with my
brother at the beach.
Praise doing the puzzle with my mother.
Praise my father explaining the universe.
Praise that after visiting Great-Grandma
Bertha's,
we went to Coney Island.
Praise three of us fitting in one seat on the
Cyclone.
Praise the weird little town where you were
raised.
Praise that you were born here where I was born.
Praise the ex-lovers we have in common; praise
chocolate.
Praise living at the millennium.
Praise the rotary phone.
Praise broccoli rabe with garlic and olive oil.
Praise total abandon.
Praise bringing out the harpies.
Praise using every muscle.
Praise thirst and water.
Praise the landing on the moon.
Praise singing loud and hard.
Praise going to bed exhausted.
Praise your poems.
Praise my poems.
Praise that we drink too much.
Praise you promising me that you will stop
smoking.
Praise how I moon over you.
Praise how you love me.
Praise your strong husband.
Praise dancing to swing.
Praise dancing to the blues.
Praise the borscht at Veselka.
Praise my first gray hairs.
Praise acetaminophen.
Praise Aus-tra-lo-pithecus.
Praise speaking the truth.
Praise knowing that life is an endeavor of
truth.
Praise knowing that life is the becoming towards
truth.
Praise the authentic moments of working with
someone towards truth.
Praise desire.
Praise stupefying desire.
Praise north and south.
Praise the yellow sun on the red brick buildings
outside my windows.
Praise knowing that it is midnight out the back
window
because the cafe lights go off.
Praise oranges.
Praise midnight out the front windows and the
Empire State Building
goes dark.
Praise Cezanne's apples and oranges.
Praise men from their callused feet to their
beautiful thinning hair.
Praise women from Sappho biting her lip
through the first hip-swagger of the new
millennium.
Praise the shark giving birth to live young.
Praise the bird.
Praise the words "decapitated" and
"disembodied."
Praise rhyme.
Praise meter.
Praise certainty.
Praise indivisibility.
Praise the movies; praise writing songs.
Praise asking each other when we are supposed to
bleed.
Praise talking to myself alone in the dark.
Praise my endless pleasure in the godless
solitude of my private mind.
Praise the giraffe and the porcupine.
Praise sloth.
Praise gluttony.
Praise a man's hand pressing the small of my
back.
Praise your tiny feet.
Praise travel.
Praise the refusal of travel.
Praise your blue eyes.
Praise kissing men: desert of whiskers, oasis of
lips.
Praise kissing women and the effort not to bite.
Praise the lips and the tongues and the grease.
Praise the feast.
Praise agony.
Praise defeat.
Praise that we used to dance in public and that
now we dance at home.
Praise faith.
Praise glory.
Praise praise.
Praise your brilliant heart.
Praise the mystical abundance of your horrifying
heart.
No, I will not leave you if you want to worship
God.
Readings
In
a recent essay, nationally syndicated columnist
Cal Thomas reflected on an article in the New
York Times, in which Hillary Clinton was
questioned about her faith perspective.
Raised as a Methodist, Clinton admitted that
while she considers herself a Christian, she is
less sure of the doctrine that being a Christian
is the only way to salvation. Which
prompted this response from Thomas:
“Liberal
faith [to which Sen. Clinton subscribes], which
is to say a faith that discounts the authority
of Scripture in favor of a constantly evolving,
poll-tested relevancy to modern concerns—such
as the environment, what kind of SUV Jesus would
drive, larger government programs and other “do
good” pursuits—ultimately morphs into
societal and self-improvement efforts and
jettisons the life-changing message of
salvation, forgiveness of sins and a transformed
life…If there are other ways to God than
through Jesus, why did He bother to come to
Earth, allow Himself to be crucified and suffer
rejection? He might have stayed in Heaven
and told people about a spiritual GPS system
that would get them there another way.”
Our
second reading is a poem by David Whyte,
entitled “Self-Portrait”
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 speak of God.
Sermon
It
was the first truly difficult conversation for
the young couple. It bubbled up at the end
of their first season together. They had
already spent many hours together during these
first few months of their dating…adrenaline-filled,
dizzying, endless-yet-all-too-short hours that
characterize most new romances…and found that
they had perhaps more in common with one another
than with their partners in any other romantic
relationship either had previously shared.
But, this conversation…this uncomfortable
conversation…had the potential of threatening
their still-in-the-bud future together. Or
at least it felt that way to the young man, who
sensed (perhaps unfairly) that his answers to
her questions might never suffice. “Could
this be the deal breaker?” he could not help
but wonder, as he struggled to describe his
position in a way that would not compromise his
integrity, and yet would still leave room for
her to maintain hers.
The
conversation had started innocently enough, no
doubt with a light-hearted jab meant to provoke
discussion. It doesn’t matter who did
the first jabbing. And enough time has
passed, I’m not sure either of them would
remember anyway. It didn’t take
too long for the back-and-forth to move right to
the heart of the matter, though.
“I’m
just not sure you are spiritual enough,” she
told him, her words hanging in the air for a few
moments while he tried to figure out what to
say.
“I’m
definitely spiritual,” he explained. “I
just haven’t found the words or the place to
articulate what I believe.”
More
silence.
“I
guess you will just have to trust me on this
one,” he added.
Looking
back, the young man, now not quite so young
anymore, wonders if anything in the room changed
at that moment. If maybe the walls had
shaken or at least the lights had flickered a
little bit. And not just at the irony that
a discussion about faith had ended with the
comparatively faithless partner asking the
faithful one to have some faith. No,
there is more irony here to ponder. Six
years later, a year after the young couple had
wed, the young man entered theological
school. And four years later, he accepted
the call to be the minister of this very
church. A church, where, this minister has
chosen to offer a sermon this morning that has,
at its heart, the same basic question posed by
his future bride all those years ago. Is
this church spiritual enough? Is there
enough God here?
Of
course neither Susan nor I should be held too
accountable for that conversation from 16 years
ago. We were in our early twenties; we
still had many of our possessions in our parents’
homes, and many of our childhood understandings
and expectations of religion in our hearts and
minds.
But
as I thought about how to approach my topic this
morning, I kept coming back to that exchange all
those years ago…and how both of us would have
been surprised to know then where we would both
end up these many years later.
Like
a young couple in love reveling in their new
relationship, haven’t many (if not most of us)
who were not raised UU, felt some giddy delight
at finding Unitarian Universalism, this religion
with which we may feel more compatible than any
other from our past, even as we may have, at
another level, questioned just what in the world
is going on here, in this religion that feels so
unlike what we may have always thought religion
is, was or maybe even should be? As one
friend told me after she sat through her first
UU service, “I don’t know what that was, but
it wasn’t church.”
“Is
that a good thing or a bad thing?” I
asked.
“I’m
not sure yet,” she said.
I
know that there are those among us, like my
friend, who wonder what they are doing here…who
are not yet sure that this place is the home for
their spiritual quest that some of us would like
to believe it is, or at least, could be.
Some
of the problem for these folks may be a lack of
traditional God talk from the pulpit…at least
from the minister, anyway. Funny, isn’t
it, that what has drawn so many of us to
Unitarian Universalism, the lack of traditional
religious language and dogma, is what others
have difficulty (at least at first) getting
their minds around. But, then again, each
of us first arrived in a UU church from
different locales and histories, and carrying
different religious baggage, some heavier than
others.
I
remember early in my ministry here, I received a
letter from a relatively new member who had
decided that he had to leave the church because
he felt that I was too restricted in what I said
from the pulpit…that it would be unacceptable
for me to talk about God in this
community. One sentence of that letter
especially stands out in my memory. He
wrote, “I’d love to get you hooked up to a
lie detector to see what you really feel about
God.”
While
I was disappointed to see this fellow leave our
community, as I am any time we say goodbye to
someone who has been gathering with us, I was
even more saddened to acknowledge that he
thought he needed a lie detector to determine my
feelings about God.
You
know, he could have just asked me.
Of
course, even if he had, he may not have liked
the answer. On the other hand, I may not have
been all that forthcoming anyway, as the
following story, told by one of my colleagues,
suggests. I’ve told this story before,
but it’s a good one.
One
day this UU minister was approached by a member
of the congregation he then served, who with
great earnestness asked, “I need to
know. Are you a humanist or a theist?”
Somewhat surprised, the minister replied, “Why
on earth do you need to know that?”
The
member answered, “I just do. It’s very
important to me that I know where you are coming
from. So, please, tell me, if you are a
humanist or a theist.”
The
minister rubbed his chin, thought for a moment,
and responded, “I guess that all depends…”
“Depends
on what?” the member interrupted.
“Well,
it all depends on what you are.”
Becoming
exasperated now, the member shot back, “Why
does it matter what I think? I am
asking you what you think!”
“It
does matter what you think,” the
minister replied. Then he put his hand on
the member’s shoulder and continued, “If you
are a humanist, then I am a theist. If you
are a theist, then I am a humanist.”
My
colleague, in sharing that story, was not
advocating deception. I think he was
taking his role as a liberal religious leader
seriously enough to model playfulness in
religious perspectives, thereby encouraging the
members he served to question and/or inhabit
their own perceptions enough to be comfortable
even if their minister happened to believe
something they didn’t.
The
liberal religious mindset throughout time,
particularly in our Unitarian Universalist
tradition, is grounded in some basic commitments
that encourage that each of us be willing to
take our own individual perceptions of the
mystery seriously…but not too seriously…and
to give others the room to do the same.
These commitments include an emphasis on free
and open intellectual inquiry, respect for the
authority of individual experience and reason,
and consideration of any religious claim in the
light of our ever-changing understandings,
knowledge and life experiences. In a
nutshell then, liberal religion contends that an
ever-evolving “faith without certainty” is
not only possible, but can be an ethically
tenable, intellectually credible, and socially
relevant approach to religion.
Which
brings me to the Cal Thomas piece Rob
read. Though the point of the column from
which I excerpted today’s reading was to
skewer Hillary Clinton for her attempt to use
her religious faith for political gain in the
midst of a presidential campaign (one can only
hope he will be equally critical of other
faith-parading candidates who happen to share his
religious perspective), he also offers us what I
think is a concise understanding of the
difference between an orthodox and a liberal
approach to religion. Thomas bemoans a
faith, (or strongly held set of beliefs or
principles, if you will), that is constantly
evolving and relevant to modern times. He
shakes his head at a religious perspective that
would dare to forego traditional theological
notions to consider ways to improve the world in
which we live and our own lives in that
world. He maintains a narrow view of the
concepts of salvation, forgiveness and
transformation as if they have nothing at all to
do with anything other than adherence to the “authority
of Scripture,” and contends that to deviate
from the traditional, church-authorized
understandings of that scripture, even when they
are outdated, if not outlandish to our modern
sensibilities, would be to render one’s
theology irrelevant. Basically, if you are
looking for a quick understanding of liberal
religion, know that it is diametrically opposed
to these perceptions of Cal Thomas. I need
to remember to drop him a note, thanking him for
helping me explain the differences.
So,
to get back to the question of the morning, “Is
there enough God here?” I must answer it
all depends. If your idea of faith and religion
is like that expressed by Cal Thomas, meaning it
is tied to a need for certainty about the
existence of God or a quest for a definitive
understanding about He/She/It, particularly at
the exclusion of other religious perspectives, I
can safely say, there may never be enough
“God” for you here. That’s not to
say, of course, that we don’t want you
around. On the contrary, you’d probably
give a lot of our more argumentative members a
chance to hone their patience skills. I
just think you may be less frustrated
elsewhere.
On
the flipside, if you believe that the very
notion of God is insane and anyone who dares to
express theistic ideas in your presence is not
only deluded but dangerous, there may always be too
much God here, whether I say the word from
the pulpit or not. That’s because a
foundational component of our liberal religious
approach (when we are at our best anyway) is
that we not only welcome the theological
diversity of our membership; we encourage it.
The core of Unitarian Universalism is, in fact,
the understanding, that there is no
authoritative word on matters of faith…God or
no God. There is only the individual’s
unique faith journey itself. A journey at
times fraught with great confusion and despair,
but also a journey, in a community like this one
at least, within which each of us has fellow
travelers…fellow seekers…fellow human beings
with whom to bounce up against, to test our
assumptions, to celebrate and mourn life’s
transitions, and to offer and receive
compassion, as we continue on our quest to craft
lives of meaning and purpose from an existence
that we did not choose and can never fully
understand or control.
So,
I have chosen as your minister to not use the
word God, at least not without offering my own
definition, because I wouldn’t want to turn
away someone from our community by recklessly
throwing around traditional religious language
that is so loaded by others’ definitions as to
be unnecessarily unwelcoming to those with no
use for theistic notions. You see, my
vision of the beloved community, the kingdom of
God, if some of you will pardon the expression,
is a community in which all honest, non-coercive
seekers have a place, where everyone can
respectfully speak their perceptions of the
mysteries of life and expect the same respect in
return, where a speculative notion such as God
is welcomed by individuals but not trumpeted as
a fact.
One
of the former ministers of this church, Curtis
Reese, who served from 1915-1919, preached that
“theism is philosophically possible, but not
religiously necessary.” As an early
voice of the religious humanism movement, Reese
did his best to contribute to the growth of a
religion that, as he described it, “would not
be shaken if the very thought of God were to
pass away.”
On
a more personal note, since I have been using
the term after all, over the years, I have gone
from having little use for the concept of God,
to accepting it as an apt descriptor for the
communicative process described by liberal
theologian Henry Nelson Wieman as “creative
interchange,” a process that he believed was
the “source of human good,” with the power
to enrich, if not transform, human life and lead
to its highest possible fulfillment, a process
evident when people intentionally engage with
each other with the expectation that this
transformation is possible, thereby making it
so. Does it matter that I call “creative
interchange” God? Not to me. So I
rarely do.
But,
it is my goal that every sermon I preach is, in
fact, an expression of my idea of God, a vehicle
for encouraging the creative interchange that I
believe is our greatest hope, not only as a
community, or a religion, or a nation, but as a
human race.
I
never thought, during that first difficult
discussion with my future wife, that I would end
up a minister. And I’m sure she never
thought that she would end up a minister’s
wife. But, surprising as these
developments might have been 16 years ago, they
sure feel right now. I guess it has been
God…uh, I mean creative interchange…at
work. And I have Unitarian Universalism to
thank for offering me the community within which
I could question, the community within which I
could grow, the community within which I could
transform and become.
As
the saying goes:
I
sought my soul; my soul eluded me.
I
sought my God; my God eluded me.
I sought
my neighbor, and found all three.
May
it be true for us all.