A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor 1/11/04 IF I BELIEVED IN GOD What does it mean to believe in God? For most people it means that God is the Great Answer to the conundrums and confusions of life. When we go to war, knowing that violence and killing are wrong, many justify it as right because God is on our side. When bad things happen, many explain it as an act of God. I heard a story about a girl whose pet cat died. Her parents, wishing to console her, said that God had taken the cat to be in heaven with Her. The child asked, "What would God want with a dead cat?" George W. Bush, like Jimmy Carter and others before him, proclaimed that "I feel like God wants me to run for president," thus explaining personal ambition as a mission from the Deity. A couple of years ago in the Arborland Borders store a sign appeared advertising books for women about faith and prayer: "Give mom some God this Mothers Day," as though the Divine were just a tool for merchandising. A number of sports fans last fall were persuaded that "God has ordained a World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox," an event thwarted by what John Rakestraw called "the dramatic come-from-ahead losses of both teams. God as the Great Answer is satisfying to many people. Yet there are grave problems with such an understanding. War is bloody and brutal and God rarely if ever makes an appearance. More than 9,000 have been wounded, sickened, or killed in Iraq on the American side alone in less than a year. The loss of loved ones is painful. Absence, anger, guilt, sadness weight us down even if God is in heaven with our partner or pet or child or friend. What did God do to deserve such good fortune? Bush and Carter achieved their goal, but what of Pat Robertson and scores of other believers bent on political missions from God but unable to achieve them? The scourge of political life through the ages has been people who think they are or think they speak for the Deity, which is why our Constitution states clearly that there shall be no religious test for public office. One is naturally skeptical about the kind of God who would submit to being a salesman's tool, however effective. Surely Jesus spoke more divinely than marketing gurus, reminding us that "the love of money is the root of all evil," i.e., some things should not be subject to market influence or salesmen's tactics. God or no God, the less said about the sad losses of last fall the better. It was the kind of moment that led some people to share the sentiment of a character in the novel THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB, who was described as never being able to forgive God for not existing. The man leaving the church service said to the minister at the door, "Good sermon, Reverend, but all that God stuff was pretty far-fetched." God as the Great Answer can be pretty far-fetched. That does not seem to bother a lot of people. A poll described in yesterday's Ann Arbor News said that a clear majority of Americans want a president who is God-fearing, who identifies with a supreme being, and who uses religious rhetoric easily. If I believed in God, it would not be God as the Great Answer but God as the Great Question of human existence. I was raised on God as the Great Answer but found and have continued to find that unsatisfying and often "pretty far-fetched." When at the age of nine I lay on my bed wretched with fear from having stepped on a rusty nail and sure that I was going to die, what comforted me was not God or the thought of God, but potato chips and boiled custard with Oreo cookies. When I was violently sea-sick on a troop ship in the North Atlantic for ten days, it was not God or the thought of God or even any ritual prayers that got me through but the astonishing kindness of strangers, other soldiers who like me were randomly assigned to that section of the ship and who made sure that I got home all right. When one week after George Wallace had been gunned down I sat across from a very angry man who kept his hand in a bag for the whole conversation and threatened me with what was in there, what enabled me to stay in control and get through that frightening moment was the thought of my wife and my children, not any sense of letting God's will be done or thinking that God would rescue me. God is for me a Great Question more than a Great Answer. I know that many people do find comfort, inspiration, and a sense of meaning from viewing God as the Great Answer. Some of my best friends are passionate theists. Some of the brightest people in the world believe that God is the Answer. Some of the noblest individuals the earth has ever known hold firmly to the Answer that is God. Some in each of these categories, including the one I am in, are members and friends of this congregation. In Unitarian Universalist circles, we each build our own theology and we each respect the theologies of others. My theology is constructed more on questions than answers. It is a theology that would prefer not to use the word God, but that finds it in a way inescapable. The humanist leader Howard Radest wrote that "I cannot dismiss god-talk as irrelevant to my own commitments, let alone to the commitments of the vast majority of people....God-talk's work, then, is meaning, interpretation, and explanation." God-talk is about life itself, about the questions that arise unbidden in us for which we have no answers, about the need for values that are enduring and transcendent so that we can become connected to something more than this moment and this flesh we inhabit. God and God-talk have to do with questions. There are no bigger questions than the ones raised by the word God. There is first of all the question of suffering. What sense does life make in the face of death, injustice, and hideous pain? The novelist Peter DeVries has one of his characters say, "What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless existence seems to be so much congenial or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair." Czeslaw Milosz says it this way: "No, it won't do, my sweet theologians, Desire will not save the morality of God. If he created beings able to choose between good and evil, And they chose, and the world lives in iniquity, Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures, Which would find its explanation only by assuming The existence of an archetypal Paradise And a pre-human downfall so grave That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power." "Theodicy" As much as any event in life, war focuses the Question that is God sharply. Supposedly there are no atheists in foxholes. The saying comes from the experiences of men in the First World War, so much of which was trench warfare. Shells flying overhead, soldiers from the other side charging with bayonets ready, filth and muck and mire, light cut off by the smoke from fired weapons, random bullets taking the life from the man you were talking to, it was a terrifying experience. Some of the men who survived did indeed cling to God or come to believe in God or pray fervently to God to be saved. Their survival meant to them that their prayers were answered and God became a reality for them. Others had experiences like the soldiers in the Stanley Kubrick film, PATHS OF GLORY. Randomly selected to be tried for cowardice, of which they were not guilty, they paid the price of their lives for a general's ambition and foolishness. God or not God, these men died in a grievous miscarriage of justice, just as millions perished in a war whose major result was to lead to a war even more terrible. Some, like the great religious humanist leader Ed Wilson, saw the mindless brutality of those battles and rang down the curtain on their theism. Ed liked to tell the story of how, when fear came to him, he learned a new prayer: the recitation of how to dis-assemble and then re-assemble a machine gun. He could still do that litany at the age of 92! Elie Wiesel tells of watching a 12 year old boy being hanged by the Nazis in Auschwitz. He heard someone behind him mutter, "Where is God? Where is God now?" Wiesel reports that a voice within him answered, "Where is He? Here He is---He is hanging here, on this gallows..." When one approaches God as a Great Question, one can ponder these accounts of the hell that is war by saying that humanity is so prone to violence that we murder God over and over and over again. "Here He is-He is hanging here, on this gallows." Or we can say that God is always there with those who suffer, whether on a field of battle, on a bed of pain, in the agony of mental illness, in the midst of an abusive relationship, in the humiliations that are daily fare for some folk. That little boy did not die in vain, for at least two people of the thousands forced to watch his dying agony remembered the divine, the ideal, the goodness that is possible, and mourned its loss in that hanging. Or we can say that God is as helpless as humanity to stop the cruelty and killing and suffering, that it makes no difference whether God exists or not since it is clear that there will be no divine helping hand when we are in need. We might as well speak the machine gun litany as say words of prayer! There are people who have known God in each of these ways. There is no way to prove one more correct than the others. That is why God is the Great Question. Suffering is the first question raised by God. Beauty is the second. One of my long time friends is a Jesuit priest, Vernon Ruland. Vernon does theology partly through poetry. In his most recent collection there is this poem, "Raison d'Etre." "Something forces you and me to stay alive. Not just magenta sunsets, the reed arias of early morning finches, and not love alone. Is life no more than this spacious vestibule, a botched first draft, hors d'oeuvres mistaken for the feast? It's that something glorious might yet happen in this drawn-out dress rehearsal we couldn't bear to miss out on." Woven through those lines is a sense of life's hardness, life's foolishness, life's weary unfairness-botched first draft, dress rehearsal. But just as much present are intimations of loveliness-sunsets and finches-and the possibility of something glorious yet to be, a possibility we know and yearn for because we have had glimpses, some of us even full blown visions, of something that fits that description. Somewhere Feodor Dostoevsky remarks that "beauty will save us." I find it significant that that comment was used as the theme of Alexansandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Here was a man who had inhabited the Gulag Archipelago, seen the absolute depths of human depravity, suffered not for years but for decades from human cruelty and stupidity, and it was beauty that he lifted up for our consideration when given a world platform from which to speak. I do not know what in particular caught his eye, filled his ears, moved his soul. Perhaps it was the sight of a rose still blooming in mid-November in a cold climate, as one day for me it was. Perhaps it was hearing a snatch of music, not even knowing the title but knowing he would never forget the lift to his spirits that that music gave him, as hearing for the first time the voice of Paul Robeson did for me. Perhaps when he was desperately hungry there came to him the heavenly smell of baking bread, as I am sure it has been for many of us. Perhaps it was the sight of a beloved friend suddenly appearing at his door or the feeling of power at seeing waves roll endlessly upon a shore or even the joy of finally understanding a difficult idea and seeing how absolutely gorgeous that idea really is. My memory has instances of each of these as perhaps Solzhenitsyn's did. If one of the functions of a deity is to save us, then beauty is enmeshed in the God question. Beauty will save us. Einstein, by self-definition an atheist, nonetheless spoke not infrequently of God. His use of this word had to do with his appreciation of the astonishing universe his mind was gifted enough to understand in ways no one before him had done. He believed such knowledge was available to every one. He said that God does not play dice with the universe, and part of what he meant is that there is enough order-as opposed to randomness-for us to grasp the essentials of how things work. He also said that God is subtle but not malicious, which points to the difficulty, not the impossibility, of understanding the way things work and the joy at finding the elegance in how matter is constructed, holds together, relates to other matter and to energy. Beauty will save us. Here is how e. e. cummings, a Unitarian poet expressed that notion. "i thank You God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spires of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes ( i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) It may be that we think of that "unimaginable You" as a personal Deity or as a Force beyond conceiving or as the Endless Infinite Universe Itself. It does not matter. What matters is the sense of awe we express at Life, the feeling that the world is full of not just suffering and sadness, but also beauty and goodness. Beauty is one of the paths into the Great Question that is God. Thirdly, God is a Question because God is Incomprehensible. When we talk about God, if we are really talking about GOD, that which is responsible for the macroscopically and microscopically vast universe in which we find ourselves, we simply do not know what we are talking about. GOD is beyond anything we do or could imagine. There is no way to define God because to define means to place a limit on,to say what we are defining is this but not that. How can we possibly know what such limits are or if there are any limits on GOD? The Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson points out that this has two important implications. One of them is that nothing we say about God can be taken literally. "Whether explained by a theory of analogy, metaphor, or symbol, all human words about the divine proceed by way of indirection. We are always naming toward God, not defining God." Secondly, this means there will be many names for God, many ways of trying to look toward what God might be-Creator, Nature, Spirit of Life, Sacred Principle of Existence, Allah, Yahweh, Lord, God, etc., etc., etc. In the Upanishads, there is a marvelous dialogue that illustrates the many- ness of God. The question of how many gods there are is asked repeatedly, each time receiving a different answer: 3 and 300, 3 and 3000, 33, 6, 3, 1, never repeating. There is no way to know. God is Incomprehensible. If the religions of the world took this seriously, then the world would be a much more peaceful place. We would see that no one can speak the literal truth about God and that there are many and diverse ways of doing so. We could learn new names, new imaginings, perhaps even new hope. We need to learn that when we speak of God, we must realize that the best we can do is to speak in metaphor, in symbol, in poetry, and perhaps most helpful in the language of story. Arthur Krystal says that "God is a story we tell ourselves." The humanist Howard Radest writes that "in stories I find the gods." They are pointing to a truth hinted at by Spinoza in the 17th century and spelled out in brilliant detail by Fueurbach in the 19th century: that what we know of the gods is what we know of ourselves. Our imaginings about God are really ways of expressing what our humanity is about, what we are capable of, what we want to be. To make God-Indefinable, Incomprehensible-a Person is the most natural thing in the world for us to do. We anthropomorphize animals, as for 75 years we have done with a mouse named Mickey, as we do with our cats and dogs and horses and other pets.. We give life to imaginary figures like the creatures in Harry Potter tales and in the Lord of the Rings saga. They are not real at all but figments of their authors' fancies, black marks on a white paper. Given our penchant for personalizing, it is not to be wondered at that we imagine deity in human form with human characteristics. Hinduism has endless stories of various divine avatars. The Hebrew Scriptures tell one story after another about a Deity who gets angry, hears the pleas for mercy, makes plans, favors one man or woman over another, and then grows sullen and silent. Christianity's major figure is the Incarnation of God. One of his favorite teaching methods was to tell stories, parables, in which God is often a central character albeit by a different name. The story of the Prodigal Son tells of a father-a stand-in for God--eager to embrace the son who has taken his inheritance and gone away from home when that son returns home humbled by the world. The story speaks of our need for forgiveness, the need to be loyal and loving to the members of our family whatever they may do, the power of this kind of commitment to make life come round right when it most seems wrong. It is a story about the way human life is lived at its best. It is a story about God. What we say and what we learn from stories about God are really the deep truths of our own yearnings, our own imaginings, our own experiences. We do not know if these stories actually reflect the nature of God.That is beyond our ken. What matters is that we gain wisdom, insight, and inspiration to be people more committed to the pursuit of justice, more devoted to the practice of kindness, always trying not to be prideful about what we do or what has been given to us. God is Incomprehensible, but we can tell stories about God anyway. Indeed we need sacred narratives to help us see beyond the limitations of our present life. God is the Great Question of human life. God is a question we pursue through suffering, through beauty, and through incomprehensibility. We are not likely to find any final answers in this pursuit, but for many of us the Question itself is answer enough. Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Karen Armstrong, A HISTORY OF GOD: THE 4,000 YAR QUEST OF JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY,AND ISLAM, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. 2. Peter DeVries, THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB, Penguin,1961. 3. Howard Radest, "One World At A Time," HUMANISM TODAY, VOLUME 13,1999, North American Committee for Humanism. 4. Vernon Ruland, S.J., TACTYICS OF NEVERTHELESS:SELECTED POEMS, Lone Mountain Press, 2002. 5. Mary Doria Russell, THE SPARROW, Ballantine Books, 1997. 6. ......................., CHILDREN OF GOD, Ballantine Reader's Circle, 1999. 7. Deirdre Sullivan,Compiler, WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY GOD?, Cader Books, 1991. 10