Sermons Online
Reverend Bob MacDicken
Love Who...Or What (God?)
This is my third sermon in the series based on what many people call the three commandments that Jesus taught: Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. We have talked about loving ourselves and about loving our neighbors, so today we're going to look at the idea of loving God.
Now, as a child I knew what this commandment meant - love God with all your heart, mind, and strength. The idea of loving God was easy to describe and impossible to do. Things like praying nonstop, never doing anything wrong, and never having any bad thoughts. And if you really did show God you loved Him (and I was sure, then, that God was a "Him") this way -- and, of course, everyone knew that it was impossible -- then God would love you and bless you forever.
As I have grown, this commandment has made even less sense. It makes less sense to me both because of the word "commandment" (some have said that UUs would really prefer the 10 suggestions), but also because a lot has changed.
First of all, my idea of God has changed, and I can no longer envision myself as living under the thumb of a huge ageless man in the sky who writes down in a book everything I do and say. This type of idea of God seems both naive and ridiculous to me. God, or goddess as I have come to understand various aspects of the Sacred, will not sit still while I anthropomorphize her or him. In fact, while ideas like truth and creativity and love, words I often use to talk about what I believe about God, say a lot for how I want to live my life, they have done little to make my idea of God easier to understand.
For UUs, the whole idea of loving God, even if it seems good in the abstract, is really an arcane concept. A large minority of UUs say they are atheists or agnostics. Either they don't believe in any God at all, or they are willing to live with the ambiguity of not knowing whether or not there is a God.
Many more UUs have a better idea what they don't believe about God than what they do believe. I'm one of those. It is much easier to say what we don't believe -- the "man upstairs, for example -- than it is to say what we do believe about ultimate reality, or truth, or the sacred. We are really pretty comfortable with former UUA President John Buehrens' well known statement, "Tell me what kind of God you don't believe in. The chances are, I don't either."
Several years ago, struggling with my own changing beliefs and feeling a little nostalgic for the comfort and security of the belief system that I had as a youth, I wrote this poem, entitled "At a Religious Place":
I still have a lot of negative feelings
About words like God and sacred.
And somehow it feels
Like the ultimate abandonment.
But the Word
Imprinted in my brain
Says
Who has abandoned whom?
Now when I hear
The words from the Cross
"My God, my God, why . . . ?
I don't feel desperate,
But I do grieve for the loss.
Now we could spend a lot of time thinking about, debating about, discussing, etc. etc. etc. the idea of God. Dr. Armand Nicholi, Jr. has explored just the differences on this question between Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis in his new book, The Question of God. We could, for example, talk about the question of why people believe in the kind of God they do -- or why they don't.
Lewis, whose writings, including the Tales of Narnia, are well known to most of us, began his adult life as an atheist, and then went through a life transformation that resulted in his total commitment to Christianity. Freud, on the other hand, began his adult life as an atheist, and never changed his mind about it.
Freud and Lewis disagreed on most of what they wrote and thought about God and religion. They did agree on some things, however, including the idea that whatever people believe about God has something to do, positively or negatively, with their experience of their own father. Loving father -- loving God, absent father -- absent God, idealized fantasy father -- idealized fantasy God, and so on. Sometimes our idea of God is the Shadow or the opposite of our own father.
Wouldn't this make for an interesting discussion? Were Freud and Lewis right? It could certainly explain a lot about why people get bent out of shape by the word "God." If we turned it into a debate topic, I think I could argue either the pro or the con side with equal conviction, and have a lot of fun with it.
But, in the vernacular, I'm not going to go there.
Instead, I am going to postulate two ideas, and then suggest some ways that how this thing about loving God can take root in our own lives, regardless of what the word might mean.
My two postulates are these:
1) It doesn't matter what you believe about God, but it does matter what you believe about the Nature of Reality, or Truth, or that which is beyond yourself: what you believe to be true but can't prove.
2) Loving this Reality, or Ultimate Truth, or God, is both possible and necessary for human growth, maturity and contentment.
The first postulate is old news for many of you, particularly those of you who have been through the "Building Your Own Theology" (BYOT) course. Our concept of Ultimate Reality is a very personal thing.
If you have been through BYOT, or if you already have a strong aversion to any talk of God or Sacred or whatever, I hope you'll bear with me a minute while I say something a little outrageous.
I believe that everyone has a God they believe in. I believe that everyone who says they don't believe in God knows what kind of God they don't believe in -- the man upstairs, the intervening power, the One who looks over you, that which has an influence or control on our lives.
This is not the God that military chaplains talk about when they say "there are no atheists in Foxholes;" that is a different kind of stress. Rather, it is what my seminary professor, Dr. Bernard Loomer used to talk about. Now I did not enjoy Dr. Loomer's class. He was difficult, and at the time I thought he was "way out in left field." But the older I get the more I appreciate him and what he taught me.
What he said was that every human being makes assumptions about life. We make assumptions about what is the Ultimate Reality of life.
We may assume that reality is Chaos. We may assume that reality is scientific truth. We may assume that human reality is the sum total of human experience. We may assume that human life is a total accident in the universe. All of these are unprovable assumptions. They are as unprovable as the idea of a God, a creator, an organizer of the universe. They are all statements of faith.
I have come to believe that the way we experience life, the quality of our lives, depends on our assumptions. One good example of this is in the old gospel song, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passin' through." What that says about life is "don't bother to live it. Just get right with God and wait for heaven to happen." Boy, is that a destructive way to look at life, as far as I am concerned.
This is what I mean when I say that I believe that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, has a God. Lots of us don't like to use that term; we are not comfortable with it. We would rather think of "Ultimate Reality" another way, because "God" has lots of negative baggage for us.
Maturity, fulfillment, purpose, and wholeness require, however, that we know what our assumptions are, because they drive our lives, whether we know it or not. They are helping us make decisions in life, whether we know it or not. And therefore, to live a conscious, quality life, we need to know what those assumptions are. We need to understand how those assumptions affect our decisions, our actions, our relationships, our life.
Now, is it really possible to love these assumptions, this Ultimate Reality? I just listed a whole lot of things that don't sound very lovable, like chaos, scientific truth. Is it really possible to love those as ultimate reality?
As a UU I have learned a lot, thought a lot, and reasoned a lot about what the Ultimate means to me. A lot of the time, however, it is really very abstract -- not nice and concrete like "the man upstairs." We often settle on abstractions like energy or light or the force, or love, and it's hard to think of loving energy or light. And everyone knows that "falling in love with love is falling for make believe," right?
Seriously, what does loving Ultimate Reality mean? Should we simply throw out the statement? As Julia Cameron suggests in her book God is Not a Laughing Matter, a lot of us make a whole lot more of this, make it a lot "heavier," than we need to. We get really serious when we think about "Ultimate Reality." But what we need to recognize is that it is part and parcel of our lives; loving what is beyond ourselves doesn't need to be heavy and somber and difficult all of the time.
No wonder some people think the whole idea is stupid and not worth a second thought.
But we know better. We know better scientifically, through psychology and the study of human systems.
We know that life just works better for us when we can sing and dance in the rain. We know life is better when we can laugh at Mother Nature's sense of humor in creating an Aardvark or Elephant, or marvel at the fact that flowers aren't one color, or even the eight colors of the rainbow, but thousands and thousands of colors and combinations of colors.
We know that we feel better when life surprises us with something wonderful, something unexpected, and we unconsciously, instinctively respond by saying "thank you" to the Universe or to something or someone. We know that when life scares the . . . out of us, we can get through it better by whispering a quiet "help me" into the wind.
Instinctively, we already know how to love God. We do it with all of those things I just mentioned, and by paying attention to what is important to us. We do it by looking at our lives with the big picture in mind -- that interdependent web that we talk about in UU discussions and forget at so many other times.
We also know, instinctively, that loving God, by whatever name that Reality is known, is important. Starhawk says it when she talks of the Goddess as "the very force that sustains all life." How can we not care about, indeed love, that which keeps us alive and gives strength, enlightenment and feelings?
Mary Daly says it when she talks about God as a verb:
"The anthropomorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality," she says, "but they fail to convey that God is Be-ing. Women now who are experiencing the shock of nonbeing and the surge of self-affirmation against this are inclined to perceive transcendence as the Verb in which we participate -- live, move, and have our being."
To love the Sacred, then, is to love life, and to love that which is greater than our individual life, and indeed greater than all human lives together, in which we participate.
The fact is, if you already know that really loving that which is Ultimate is possible, I don't need to convince you. On the other hand, if you already know that it is a totally nonsensical idea, it is doubtful that I can say anything to change your mind. So all I can really do is talk about my own experience.
You have all heard the saying "act as if." We talked about it in the context of creative visualization. Most of the time, I haven't a clue what "loving God" really means. But I do think that there are "act as if" clues in thousands of religions and philosophies around the world.
At the beginning of this service, we read from the prophet Micah (6:8) - I like the translation in the Revised Standard Version -- " . . . What does the Lord require of you but to Do justice, love steadfastly, and to walk humbly with your God."
Do Justice:
Rabbi Harold Kushner tells of asking his students "why was Hitler wrong?" He pointed out that the majority of Germans supported him, and that he acted within the laws of his own country. What he did was both accepted by the majority and it was legal. So why was it wrong?
The students stopped for a minute, but then continued to talk about why Hitler was wrong. Kushner asked them if this meant that there is something in the human psyche that is "greater than. . . . " There is something about justice and morality that we all sense.
The point Kushner makes is that all of us have a sense of what is just, what is right, that supersedes the rule of the majority or the rule of law. It is that justice that we are called to pay attention to, to take into our hearts and minds, and to act on.
Love Steadfastly:
We've already spent a couple of sermons on this, so suffice it to say that love -- love of ourselves, love of our neighbors, love of our family, love of the sacred, is a lifetime commitment. If we are to find fulfillment and peace in our own lives, we must be continuously paying attention to what it means to love.
I think that Jesus combined doing justice and loving steadfastly when he reminded the disciples that they needed to pay attention to people in need, to the hungry and the imprisoned and the sick. Remember the story. "I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and in prison and you visited me." When? When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.
Many UUs have a problem with this. We often make grand pronouncements about saving the world, making peace, stopping capital punishment, when we don't even get along with the person who sits in the seat next to us in church. We can remember all the mistakes they made, all the arguments we have had with them.
We are great at loving humanity and hating people. But loving the ultimate good starts with taking care of the needs of those close to us.
Walk Humbly With Your God:
Speaking of UUs having trouble -- we really have trouble with humility. It is easy for us to brag about UU children having the highest SAT scores of any denomination. It is easy for us to take pride in our social action, our commitment to other people. We point with pride to UUs who signed the Declaration of Independence, to our participation in the Civil Rights movement and the Peace movement. We may need reminding , lest we get too proud, to complacent, that a Unitarian Southern General was involved in organizing the KKK.
Walking humbly with your God has an easier meaning, I think, than simply eliminating pride. We need to understand that what we know, what we believe, what we understand, and what we can do is limited. We are human beings. We can do a great deal; but we need to keep in mind that we only think we know what's true and right.
Walk humbly? At its simplest, there is something we can do, indeed that we need to do. We need to approach every encounter, every opportunity to connect with another human being, with the knowledge that there is something we can learn. "I told you so," or "I already knew that," are the deadliest enemies of the kind of humility that allows us to experience the sacred in our lives.
Love God? We'll never agree on what or who God is, and I think that doesn't matter. However, it does matter what we believe. Loving that that is greater than ourselves keeps things in the right proportion and perspective. It helps us stay grounded in reality while paying attention to what is possible.
What matters is that we commit ourselves to learning and growing, to living up to the best that we know and seeking always to know more. What matters is that we stay true to what we believe, while staying open to others, and to expanding and changing our beliefs as we learn more.
Shalom.