Homily from March 8,
2009
by Peter Scales
Trustee,
Canadian Unitarian Council
"God: Welcome But Not Necessary"
Central
points: There are identifiable threads of belief or reverence within
our movement. I will describe a few of those threads and will discuss
why we seem able to gather in community on Sunday mornings.
My
aim today is to inform, and to encourage dialogue.
I am a typical Unitarian and, like so many of you, I enjoy the
questions more than the answers. So
today’s talk won’t have a lot of answers but it might suggest some
good questions. I doubt it
will convince you of anything, but I hope we’ll have a good
discussion.
Here’s
how I’ve structured my talk:
First:
What do I mean by god, and ‘belief in God’?
Second:
How has belief in gods changed over the years, up to and including
today’s Unitarianism?
Third:
What are the identifiable threads of belief or reverence in our
movement? If not god, then
what is it that draws us to gather in community on Sunday mornings?
First:
What do I mean by god, and ‘belief in God’?
What
is god? Unitarians often
have a tough time with the word or the concept of god.
We’re often not sure of where she belongs.
In a
class at Queen’s University, a rabbi told me that it is misleading
to refer to God as a ‘who’ because the God of the Jews is beyond
who-ness. Recently at UVic,
a United Church chaplain reminded me that ‘God is love’ and
although we often use ‘him’ or ‘her’ language, God is beyond
all that. I’ll talk more
about the United Church a little later in this talk.
Belief
in god is a difficult thing to nail down.
What does it mean to say, “I believe in god”?
Is it like gravity, which I believe in beyond a shadow of a
doubt and which rules my every moment, but which I don’t often think
about? I don’t revere
gravity, and I think that’s a difference.
People who say that they ‘believe in god’ also give worth
to their god, and with that worth-ship comes reverence.
Saying
“I believe in god” does not imply that “I only believe in
god” – they can also believe in gravity and science, for instance
– but these days in Canada the statement tends to imply that “I
believe in one capital-G god: the one in the Torah, New Testament and
Koran.”
If
you ask a typical Unitarian if they believe in god, you are likely to
get a yes, a no, or a maybe. And
sometimes you will also get a short speech.
Or a question. <grin>
Second:
How has belief in gods changed over the years, up to and including
today’s Unitarianism?
Archeological
records suggest that people have worshipped objects and beings
forever. People have
worshipped the sun and moon, the soil that yields crops and the land
that suffers earthquakes, animals who periodically give their lives
for our sustenance, mother figures who represent the giving of life,
and of course human and human-like figures who hold power over one
aspect or another of our lives. We
know some of the names: Zoroaster.
Apollo. Mithra.
Jupiter. Venus and
Mars. Yahweh.
God. Allah.
The Virgin Mary.
Israelites
understood several gods, including city gods and household gods.
During
their captivity in Babylon, most Israelites fully adopted monotheism.
When
they returned from captivity, some people saw the Israelites as weak
because they had only one god. Wasn’t
it better to have many gods, with separate jobs, like Roman &
Greek gods? But the
Israelites were convinced that their god was number one, even when he
let them get wiped out in battle.
The Israelites in ancient times, and the Jews today, believe
that if they revere and obey god by upholding their end of the
covenant that they have with god, then they will be rewarded as the
Chosen People.
I
learned a few years ago that Paul, who Christians call the ‘Apostle
Paul’, was a Jew who had a sudden conversion to Christianity near
Damascus, in modern-day Syria. Paul,
who had never met Jesus, nonetheless preached that there was one God,
and that Jesus was the conduit.
According to Paul, all other gods were rubbish.
After him, early Christians, with the organizational energy
that marked the Roman Empire, moulded Mithraic and other local
festivals into Christian rites. Easter
and Christmas are the biggies. I’d
be happy to talk about those another time, or during the forum after
coffee.
[later,
Sara pointed out that in the Acts of the Apostles, 9:1, it is the
voice of Jesus who addresses Paul at the Damascus gate]
Contact
with the East. Unitarian
ministers visited India and established Unitarian churches there
between the 1790s and 1880s. At
least one of those ministers served in Toronto after India, and I
can’t help thinking that his contact with Indian cultures and
mythologies would have affected his concept of the divine.
Confucianism:
Kung Fu-Tse, born 551 BCE, preached the Good Life.
The self is defined by social contacts.
Rules for personal behaviour.
Independent of gods.
Criticism
of the Bible, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
Anyone with time, patience and healthy sense of skepticism can
find errors and inconsistencies in the Bible.
Once we learn a bit about who wrote and edited the Bible, even
if we want to believe that it was divinely inspired, we can see that
it is a man-made and fallible document.
And if the document is filled with obvious flaws, how can a
belief system based only on the Bible be truthful?
Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species...
Transcendentalism
of the 1840s: religious authority rests in each person.
Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (1813-1860) wrote “The
Transient and Permanent in Christianity.”
Emerson and Thoreau are also transcendentalists.
Skepticism...
Reaction to the world wars...
1961:
Unitarian amalgamation with much smaller Universalist denomination.
Unitarians
believe that Man is too good to damn.
Universalists
believe that God is too good to damn Man.
Perhaps
spirituality is what people feel before religion puts dogmatic bounds
on how we already feel.
The
importance of rationality, to Unitarian humanists and even to
Christians, Muslims and Jews who find themselves drawn to the
Unitarian community.
Historically,
Unitarian congregations have welcomed Canadians and Americans who have
lost faith in the religion of their parents, or because the judgements
of their home church do not mesh with their lived lives.
People often come to us broken in spirit.
Some of those folks – and I know that I’m talking about
people in this room, as I could be in any Unitarian hall in Canada –
want to know where God fits. One
challenge is how to separate love for God and Jesus, from love for the
church. I think the
opposite is how to separate hatred or disdain for the church, from
positive feelings about God and Jesus.
Most
Unitarians agree that Jesus was a human man who lived in historical
time. He may have been a
teacher or a healer. He
may have been a communist, urging everyone to share everything and
overthrow systems of power. He
may have been an egomaniac, believing that he was the only path
to salvation. When I was
taking Philosophy at UVic, a Jewish student told me that he knew Jesus
was Jewish because the record is clear that he lived at home till he
was 30, believed that his dad was a big shot, and revered his mother
above all other women. So
whereas Jews and Unitarians tend to agree that Jesus was a man who
taught lessons about personal conduct and social order, most
Unitarians do not believe that Jesus was any more godly than any other
human being. But this does
not minimize Jesus. Rather,
it places him on a pedestal alongside a handful of great spiritual
leaders.
Third:
What are the identifiable threads of belief or reverence in our
movement? If not god, then
what is it that draws us to gather in community on Sunday mornings?
I
want you to take a look at your order of service, on the back.
There are the seven principles of Unitarian-Universalism.
The second one is that we affirm and promote ‘justice, equity
and compassion in human relations’. This
is what Jesus taught. It
is also what Aristotle taught, what Kung Fu-tse taught, and what the
early North American Unitarian preachers taught.
The
seventh principle is there, too: Unitarians affirm and promote
‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are
a part’. The
archeological record tells us that our distant forebears respected the
sky, the earth and its animals, and they likely realized that we are
part of that web of existence. Certainly
the Lekwungen people who have lived on these lands for over
four thousand years know that. And
so do the Buddhists.
Now,
take a look in your hymnals, among the first pages.
There you will find the principles and also the sources.
The first source – direct experience of that transcending
mystery and wonder – relates to the feeling most of us have when we
see the ocean’s power or nature’s beauty, in science class or on
Dallas Road, and this source of our living tradition [notice the name
of the hymnal] inspires us with awe and wonder.
The second source – words and deeds of prophetic women and
men – could be about Jesus but is also about Mahatma Gandhi, the
Catholic monk Martin Luther and the Christian minister Martin Luther
King, and the Canadian Unitarian minister Fred Cappuccino who inspired
and continues to lead seven orphanages in India.
The third source – wisdom from the world’s religions –
guides us to consider other gods and other traditions of reverence and
action. I will leave you
to read the other sources on your own time but I want to point out
that this religious pluralism – a hallmark of modern Unitarianism
– enriches and ennobles our faith!
It makes us who we are, and who we want to be.
I
want to return to our theological cousins in the United Church.
Lately, United Church ministers Gretta Vosper of Toronto and
Bruce Sanguin of Vancouver have been paving the way for ‘progressive
Christians’ to rely less on theological arguments about divine
nature, and more on living Christ-like lives that are creative,
forward-looking, loving and transcendent.
Reverend Gretta Vosper’s 2008 book was subtitled ‘the way
we live is more important than what we believe’, a position that has
been held by Canadian Unitarian-Universalists since before Lotta
Hitschmanova established the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada.
In fact, I believe that a cornerstone of my Unitarianism is
just what Reverend Vosper says: it matters more how we live
than what we believe.
This
congregation – this community of hope and of shared joys and
concerns – does not demand belief in any of the gods.
Not Apollo, not Zoroaster, not Oestre the fertility goddess,
not Yahweh or God or Allah, not Gaia the earth, and not “market
forces”. At the same
time, if belief in one or more gods helps you to live a moral life,
then you are welcome here. Like
Unitarian congregations across North America, this community affirms a
set of principles and sources that call us to love our neighbours as
ourselves, to live lives of meaning and rationality.
These
are the identifiable threads of belief and reverence within our
movement. These
principles and sources guide me in my ongoing quest to live a
good and moral life. In my
life, God is welcome but not necessary.
In this congregation, God is welcome but not necessary.
And so, in the words of the Sufi Muslim poet, ‘Come come
whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, ours is no
caravan of despair, come, yet again come.’
Peter
Scales, MA
Trustee,
Canadian Unitarian Council
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