Like Water for God

According to our worship schedule from the newsletter compiled at the end of August, I'm supposed to be speaking about community this morning. But so far this church year, community has been what I've spoken about every week. Our first Sunday was our ingathering service, when we all celebrated being reunited after the summer and shared our summer adventures with each other. Our second Sunday I spoke about the events of September 11th calling us to be more than we feel we are and about our community being one thing that helps us be more and better than we might otherwise be. Our third Sunday I spoke about the discipline of community: that searching together requires us to learn how to be together and that the deliberation and reflection community life requires is a spiritual discipline as much as Buddhist meditation or Islamic prayer or Jewish devotional practice. There is indeed more to say about community, particularly our planned topic exploring what the ties are that exist between us in this particular congregation, but before that I feel a need to speak about one of the diversity of issues before us which have pressing spiritual, emotional, ethical and religious implications.

We are hearing a great deal on television, radio and in print on the question of theology - specifically, where is God? Is this a religious conflict, or a cultural one. When we watch our political leaders sing God Bless America, what are they doing and what are we feeling as we watch? Whose side do we think God is on? What makes us think God takes sides at all? Can God be responsible for this, or accepting of this, or make this right? Some people point to such events as proof of the incomprehensibility of God's plan. Others understand the same events as evidence that God, as anyone understands God, doesn't exist.

Times like this are inherently religious. We search for meaning. We look for restitution. We seek something to answer our need to believe in order at a time when chaos seems supreme. And Unitarian-Universalists do this the same as anyone else. We lament senselessness. We seek reasons and understanding. And we look within ourselves and our faith for a context that will help us reason and understand.

Unitarian-Universalist theology is all over the map. Some of us are atheists. Some are theists, meaning we believe in god as a creative power in the universe. Some are Theists with a capital T, meaning we believe in one god as creator and ruler of the universe whom we connect to through ongoing experiences of divine revelation. Some are deists, meaning we believe in god based on evidence in reason and nature. Some are Deists with a capital D, meaning we believe in a god who created the world but has since remained indifferent to that creation. Some are agnostics. Some are Buddhists. Some are Christian, some are Jewish, some are existentialists.

Some of us are humanists. Some are mystical humanists. There are as many combinations and nuances for UU theological positions as there are UUs because no one ever seems to believe exactly the same thing. Some of us perceive god in nature, in the miracles of seasons, birth, beauty, peace and the indefatigable power and patterns of life. Some of us perceive god in works of humanity: philosophy, architecture, idealism, compassion, care. But one thing true for almost all UUs is that we struggle with our beliefs. We struggle to define what we believe, what we doubt, what we disbelieve. And even if we find definitions, they change as we change, as our lives and life experiences change.

Doesn't this make our theological discussions difficult? It's hard to look up and describe intangibles you perceive above you when the ground is shifting under your feet. And as we have been painfully reminded in recent days, life keeps the ground shifting under our feet. Because UUism does not have any creedal requirements, it is easy for us to turn away from the difficult work of trying to figure out what we believe, what we feel, and therefore what we should practice: should we pray? Meditate? Read? Read what? Pray to who? Meditate according to what tradition?

And much as we don't like to admit it, ministers are about as prone to such evasion, or laziness, as any lay members. No one can be mindful of such issues and questions all the time and lead a normal life at the same time. Nonetheless, I, you, we are all here because we are religious liberals.

That means we hold ourselves responsible for our beliefs and our practices. We do not gather because we ought to, or because we grew up doing this, or to please someone we love. Indeed some of us are here though it displeases someone we love. Most of us are from another religious tradition, or none, and we are here, together, because we believe in something we find here.

For some of us it may be the grace we find in community with each other. For others it may be the spiritual dimensions we explore as UUs, or the intellectual, rational curiosity we share with each other in sharing our lives' and souls' journeys in this congregation. For a number of us, it is the openness and welcome we bring to all faiths, our belief there are sacred truths for us to learn in all the world religions, our insistence that people of different faith backgrounds can join and find common threads and enlightenment to share and rejoice in, that brings us here, or keeps us coming. For some it is our commitment to real social justice for all in the world regardless of race, creed or any orientation.

Regardless of what brought us in, or keeps us coming, as religious liberals, we are responsible for our beliefs and practices, both secular and sacred. Now, the secular we attend to fairly regularly, but the sacred, howsoever we identify it, requires time in all our lives also. Our reflections, our learning, our sharing, may leave us still unsure of our beliefs, and that is okay - part of UU belief is that revelation is continuous, that our whole lives are a process of learning and unlearning, belief and doubt. But to eschew any spiritual reflection, any learning, any sharing in our own lives and characters - when we overlook that responsibilities, we shortchange ourselves, our families and each other.

Many of my own spiritual reflections are simply questions, many of them simply clichés. Why do bad things happen to good people? What, if anything, redeems evil? Is life fundamentally meaningful? If so, what makes it so? Are the personal experiences I have had of a presence, a power, in the world or in a moment true? Once I prayed to be cured of a small health problem, and the problem disappeared in a couple of days, though I had had it for months. A Baptist minister and teacher of mine had the same thing happen to him. A wise Methodist chaplain and teacher of mine, a person of great integrity, stayed outside the door of a transplant patient she had become close to at Mass General Hospital and prayed for his recovery, and the patient died. People we love are stricken with illness they do not deserve and there is nothing to justify it or change it or redeem it. Goodness goes unrewarded or gets frustrated. Evil prospers. Innocents suffer and die. We who have no creeds forced or even taught to us, what are we to make of this world?

Feeling the absence of the divine does not necessarily make you an atheist. Strong testimony to that is in Psalm 10, where the psalmist writes with passionate despair of the abandonment he feels from God, while believing still that God is there and may be evoked:

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor - let them be caught in the schemes they have devised. For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord. In the pride of their countenance the wicked say "God will not seek it out." All their thoughts are, "There is no God." Their ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of their sight; as for their foes, they scoff at them. They think in their heart, "We shall not be moved; throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity." Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under their tongues are mischief and iniquity. They sit in ambush in the villages; in hiding places they murder the innocent.....They stoop, they crouch, and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, "God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it." Rise up, O Lord, O God, lift up your hand; do not forget the oppressed. Why do the wicked renounce God and say in their hearts, "You will not call us to account."? But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan...O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek; you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more."

> Now while the psalmist who wrote those words expressed a passion we all feel at times, his beliefs and his theism are not elements we can all subscribe to ourselves. But it is an important example for our consideration because it does point to the fact that perceiving the absence of god may make you an atheist, but then again it may not. It may make you an all-the-more impassioned theist.

UUs pride ourselves a lot, maybe sometimes too much, on being rational, educated, sophisticated, civilized people. We do not express ourselves crudely. We do not even believe crudely. It is essential, in the midst of all this rationalism and enlightened liberalism, not to rationalize ourselves right out of appreciating spiritual experiences and lessons for what they are and what they might be. I've told you before that Greece is a place where I occasionally feel a very strong sense of a power or presence which is the closest thing I can perceive to god. Each time it happens, I say to myself; "Remember this. Remember how strong it is. Remember how beyond words it is. Memory will fade this moment, and your inherent cynicism and intellectualism will undermine the strength of this experience in your life and your beliefs. Remember it. Value it. Try to keep believing it because you know how strongly you feel it right now."

Part of the reason I keep going back to Greece is that memory does fade those moments and my inherent cynicism and intellectualism do undermine the strength of those experiences in my life and my beliefs. I remember how I felt about them then, but I don't feel the feelings any more, and the power of those experiences diminishes over time.

And far more challenging than the rational sides of our psyches, there are too many times in all of our lives, in the lives of the millions and billions, in the lives of everyone who has ever lived and died on this planet, when there is no grace to be found, no lesson, even if a lesson, not one worth the suffering or loss: no redeeming value. God, goodness, justice, compassion, are so profoundly missing, so absent, so void so much of the time; the spaces in our lives empty of grace or salvation or justice or succor echo like a gong they are so empty. Existential pragmatism is the only relief, such as it is, engendered by such loneliness of the soul and harsh experience in life.

Reflecting on this, and lamenting it in my mind, I realized that even this, the ebb and flow of my sense of grace or god or divinity or power in the world, offers a kind of theology, a simile theology: like water for god. Because for me the divine, if and as it exists, is like water. It takes different shapes under different circumstances. Sometimes it comes in torrents. Sometimes there is a drought. Sometimes it comes in small drops. Sometimes it sits calm and still in a quiet place. Sometimes it roars like the sea in a storm. Sometimes it comes in waves. Sometimes we pray for it. Sometimes we take it for granted. It can take different shapes within the various containing spaces that exist for it on earth. It has no essential form or type. Sometimes we think we see it but it is a mirage, like a pool in a desert. Sometimes it comes in a form we cannot accept. Sometimes it is not there when we are thirsty for it, even dying for it. Sometimes there is so much we could drown if we're not careful. Some people are drawn to it, want to make it the basis for their lives and lifestyles. Some people don't see any appeal and prefer to base their lives far from it, where other elements beckon. It is the power for life or death, we can use it and appreciate, underestimate or overestimate it in a million different ways.

It may not work for everyone, but this simile theology does reflect my own experience and attraction and bewilderment when confronted with both water and god. They can be frightening, or beautiful or both at the same instant. Immensely powerful, deep, still very little understood on this planet, still both the subject of much debate and controversy as to what they are at their deepest levels, and as to what their significance can and should be for humankind. The absolute presence of water in an ocean does not contradict the utter absence of water in a desert. This is true of my sense of god as well. I remember my moments of certainty of power, and I remember also my and others' moments perceiving divine inconstancy and absence.

Most theologians take their theology further. If they do believe in a god, they suggest that god is self-constrained by allowing us all free will and that that is the basis for evil in the world. Or that god has unlimited creative power, but limited intervention power; that we are god's unwitting partners on whom god relies, and it is when we let our end down that evil or injustice prevail. Or simply that god is not omnipotent, and cannot right all wrongs, though god perceives them all, and mourns them with us. Of course those all presuppose that god is sentient, and sentient in the way humans are - it buys into the biblical idea that we are created in god's image. There are other ideas as well, substance for many sermons.

But for this one, my hope is that whether or not the idea of the divine being in some ways like water helps you define your own theological position, perhaps even in opposition to all those I have articulated in this sermon today, that the idea of our all being bound by our belief in ourselves as religious liberals requires us to some personal reflection, or theological soul-searching every so often, is one you will consider. For anyone, humanist to devout creedal believer, it is important to take the spiritual, enlightening, uplifting experiences and ideas of life seriously, and to consider their application in our own lives, even as our lives and our selves change, especially now when patriotic feeling is high and people are making proprietary statements regarding God and justice and rightness all over the world. What we know today is different from what we knew yesterday or a month ago or what we will know tomorrow or next year.

Human beings with all the gifts and limitations of our species, we may not always believe what we understand, and we may not always understand what we believe, but working to reconcile what we know, what we believe, what we understand and what we experience is the some of the highest work of life, and some of the richest legacy we leave to those we love and teach. It keeps us humble, it keeps us honest, it keeps us engaged, it keeps us hopeful, it keeps us strong, it makes us better at anything we do. It is one of humankind's greatest capacities. It has all the power of any blessing to be used for good or for evil or for naught. Let us remind ourselves of our responsibility to use it, and to use it for good. Amen.