“THE RELIGION OF GOD”

A sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 4, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

You know, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time! I’m referring to speaking on the topic “The Religion of God.” It seemed like a good idea. A month or so ago, when I was facing a deadline to come up with a sermon topic for October 4, something inexplicable, something almost irrational, took hold of me and convinced me it might be a good idea to talk about, you know, “The Religion of God.”

So I submitted that topic thinking, at the time, it was a good idea. I’ve given lots of religious biography sermons. I’ve spoken about the religious views of people from scientist Albert Einstein to President Millard Fillmore to the truly inspiring story of children’s books writer Beatrix Potter. I’ve prepared sermons on everyone from the poet Kahlil Gibran to the composer Bela Bartok to the 19^th century German theologian Franz Bibfeldt, who has been at times widely popular in spite of the fact that he is completely imaginary.

So, I thought to myself last month, writing on “The Religion of God” would be a cakewalk for me. But as the calendar got closer and closer, and the days approached to the inevitable “D-Day” – that is “deliver the sermon day” -- it began to dawn on me that this task may not be quite as easy as what I expected.

For one thing, God isn’t exactly researchable. There is no encyclopedia entry under the title “God’s Religion.” Even in theological works, you can find chapters dealing with God’s Existence or what names the different human religions give to God or God’s relationship to nature. But nothing on the Religion that God believes. I did try, of course, to research the topic, and I came across much interesting but irrelevant information. I found an article entitled, “Did God Have a Wife?” If you are interested, it has been discovered that the very ancient Israelite religion included the belief that God -- that is, Yahweh -- had a consort named Asherah. (As you can probably tell, when you are writing about a topic that nobody knows anything about, it is quite easy to become distracted and stray off course.)

No, the topic of God’s Religion is not available for research, and research is what I usually rely on for pretending that I know something. I might have guessed that from the beginning if I had paid attention to the Apostle Paul who wrote in the eleventh Chapter of the Book of Hebrews about God:

“how unsearchable are his judgments, or unfathomable his ways. Who has known the mind of the Lord?”

But I didn’t heed that wisdom, and instead published a sermon entitled “The religion of God – something that seemed a good idea at the time. Eventually, I came to realize that I had inadvertently stumbled upon what may be the only topic that could offend every single Unitarian Universalist on the wide spectrum of UU beliefs. For the Unitarian theist, the topic of “The Religion of God” sounds way too flippant, maybe even blasphemous. To the non-theist among us, it takes the idea far too seriously, as if God were so real and so human-like as to formulate a belief system. And what about those among us who insist they aren’t religious at all – they are instead “spiritual”? I suppose my next sermon will have to be called “The Religion of Spirituality.”

If this innocent topic might offend even UUs, I started to wonder, could it also offend God? I got to thinking that maybe I should ask those sitting in pews closest to the window to watch for storm clouds gathering which might produce thunderclaps. I wondered whether the weather report this morning might warn of “cloudy with a chance of well-aimed lightning bolts.” Perhaps this topic wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But I can also add, thankfully, that this topic does have one thing in its advantage over most other topics. Here is something so absurd that I can waste, and have succeeded in wasting, three or four of my precious opening manuscript pages explaining how stupid the topic is in the first place, and I can delay actually addressing the subject.

But it is, I fear, time to address the subject. I begin approaching the religion of God by using an approach called the “via negativa,” or the “negative path” to understanding God. This approach was not uncommon in medieval Christian theology, and it survives today. It can also be found in many other of the world’s religions.

The via negativa begins with the proposition that any true knowledge of God is impossible. God is not an object in the universe like any other object, so God cannot be described like we might describe anything else. Any true knowledge of God is impossible. In the New Testament book of First Timothy, the apostle Paul describes God as one “who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.

There is a wonderful word in religion that crosses almost all established religions of the world. The word is “ineffable,” meaning it is so far beyond our capacity to understand that we cannot put into words. Webster’s dictionary says of ineffable that means “incapable of being expressed in words.” We all have had that experience: witnessing the birth of a child cannot be precisely described. How many times have we been moved by something to say, “words are inadequate to explain how I feel.” The first astronauts were absolutely speechless when they saw the earth from space, floating like a precious stone in emptiness.

Most religions do understand God as “ineffable.” We cannot describe God in words simply because as mere mortals, we are incapable of understanding the true meaning of divine, or the true meaning of infinity, or the true meaning of omnipotence – being all-powerful. Tertullian, the second century theologian who embraced some of this “via negativa” said, “that which is infinite is known only to itself.”

As I say, this concept of the holy being ineffable is found in most religion. In Chinese Taoism, the closest idea to what the West calls “God” they call “Tao.” And the Tao Teh Ching, the key scripture, begins with these words: "The Tao you can understand is not the true Tao." Ineffable.

In Indian Hinduism, the closest idea to what the West calls “God” they call “Brahman.” Hinduism, of course, is polytheistic with many gods, and that is because we who are imperfect cannot adequately understand, and therefore adequately worship Brahman, which is perfect. Brahman is ineffable, but we can have some understanding of the minor, more imperfect gods. One Hindu prayer goes like this:

Oh Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations:

Thou art everywhere, but I worship you here;

Thou art without form, but I worship you in this form;

Thou needest no praise, yet I offer you these prayers and salutations.

Oh Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations.

So the via negativa begins with the rather startling but self-evident proposition that due to our human limitations, we are incapable of having adequate knowledge of who God is, because God is ineffable. So we can’t really know or understand God at all. This fact creates somewhat of a roadblock in my task to uncover and describe the Religion of God.

But the via negativa says that even if we can’t know God’s attributes – what God is – we are able to approach an understanding of what God is not. That is, the closest we can get to understanding God is to rule out all things that are self-evidently not God.

Here is how the via negativa can work. God is often described as “all-powerful,” “omnipotent” is the technical term. But we mortal human beings have absolutely no experience with anything that’s “all-powerful.” The concept is so foreign to us that it makes no sense to describe God as “all-powerful” since we can’t understand what that means. If you think you understand the meaning of “all-powerful,” try solving this ancient conundrum about omnipotence

If God is all-power, then can God create a rock so big and heavy that even he can’t lift it?

Whether God can’t lift the rock, or whether God can’t create such a rock that can’t be lifted, God fails, and is not all-powerful.

But the via negativa solves this paradox. Instead of saying God is “all-powerful,” a concept we mortals cannot really “wrap our brains around,” we can say that God’s power is not limited. All of us know what it means to have “limited” power. So if you apply this via negativa to the conundrum, “Is God able to create a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?” the answer is “false,” because in either case – if God can’t lift the rock or God can’t create such a rock -- God’s power is limited. Through the via negativa we know that God’s power can’t be limited, so this conundrum must have nothing to do with divine power. It is about the limited kind of power that humans experience. So that’s the via negativa. It can be applied to all concepts about God. We can’t honestly say that God is “all-knowing,” that is “omniscient.” Knowing everything is not remotely a human experience. But we can say that God is not ignorant, because we know what it means to be ignorant. We cannot say that God is eternal or infinite. Humans have no direct experience of infinity or eternity. But we can say that God is not temporal or mortal. That may not say a lot about God, but it at least tells us something that we are capable of comprehending, and that is all we can know. And so on.

I expect you get the idea without further illustration.

Before continuing, let me say just a brief word of disclaimer. I have been using the word “God” quite a bit, and will continue using it. For those who don’t use the word, or are not comfortable with the concept, let me offer a word of clarification. There are a cluster of human concepts that the word “God” points to. Some call it a “Higher Power,” some call it Natural Law, some call it Spirit of Life” Paul Tillich’s phrase for God was our “Ultimate Concern.” Alternately, some think of it as the Divine Reality or the “Ultimate Reality. In Star Wars it was simply the “Force” – as in “the Force be with you!” My use of the word “God” here is an umbrella word inclusive of all the others. Any word which points to a transcendent reality would do. Albert Einstein certainly held to no traditional views of God, but the following description he gives to a “higher power” falls within what I am meaning this morning when I speak of “God”:

“Everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of (human beings), and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

So Einstein speaks of a “spirit vastly superior to that of human beings.” That is approximately what I mean when I use the word “God,” which I am using today: first, because it is far less cumbersome than “a spirit vastly superior to that of human beings”; second because it is the most common and recognizable word available, however ambiguous it may be; and third, because the word “God” is in my sermon title!

I approach the Religion of God from a via negative – discovering what seems to me at leas what is obviously not God’s religion.

I feel quite strongly about declaring that God is not an Episcopalian. Nor is God a Unitarian. God is not a Baptist, or a Mormon, or a Catholic or a Presbyterian. God is non-sectarian. Furthermore, God is not a Hindu or a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist. God is not a Rastafarian, a Zoroastrian, or a Bokononist. God is non-creedal. Creeds are human inventions, and human inventions are all –every one – flawed, subjective and biased. God subscribes to no creed at all. If we are trying uncover what the Religion of God does not include, it seems obvious to me that human creeds have nothing to do with God’s religion. Or more precisely, God has nothing to do with human creeds.

Here is another conclusion I have on a matter of a different sort. It seems obvious to me that God does not torture people. Torture is something human beings do to each other, and up until the recent past, it has been generally viewed as wrong, though some choose to do it anyway. If God is not a torturer, then there is of course no room in God’s religion for everlasting torture in hell, or even for everlasting punishment, which seems to me would feel like torture. But this is just my conclusion using the via negativa. God doesn’t torture. I’m just saying...

And another conclusion: I would rule out from God’s religion the attitude of jealously. God is not jealous of anything. There aren’t many human qualities that are more uniquely human than jealousy. After all, why would someone with absolute perfection be jealous of anything? If you were perfect is there anything that would make you jealous? Some say God is jealous when some people worship other gods. First of all, it is hard to worship a God that is beyond human understanding, that is ineffable. If no one is capable of understanding the divine, then no one is capable of worshipping what they cannot understand. Second of all, I’ve never quite understood why people think God wants our continuous praise. Does it feed God’s ego? I can imagine that God would be satisfied if we praise or even worship anything that is good within creation – after all, creation is the only avenue we have for discovering what partial understanding we have of God.

My attempt at describing the Religion of God today has been quite a challenge. It is bit like, as they say, nailing Jell-O to the wall. But as awkward and as bumbling as it has been, I’ve found the project helpful to do. I’ve sounded tongue –in-cheek a lot, I know, and I’ve confessed far more ignorance than understanding, but the basics of what I’ve tried to say I hold on to.

I’m convinced that there is very little, if anything, that human beings can say about the God concept that isn’t deeply and thoroughly distorted because our thought processes cannot reach beyond human experience. God is outside the human realm, and we can’t conceive of the nature of something outside the realm of our experience.

Based on our experience, it is much more reliable to suppose what God is not than it is to suppose what God is. And I believe that God, or whatever metaphor or euphemism for God you want, is not creedal, does not inflict cruel and unusual punishment on people, and has no reason to be jealous of anything, and is not impressed by praise and worship. Those qualities are thoroughly human qualities. Humans may benefit from worship of God, but it is for us, not God.

In my previous sermons on religious biography, I could report that the person I was talking about was born on such and such a date, and that they had this and that experience that shaped their lives. I could say that the great infidel Mark Twain was best friends with the local congregational minister named Joseph Twichell, or that Susan B. Anthony signed the membership book of the Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York. I’m afraid I don’t have the luxury of saying anything remotely factual like that about the Religion of God. In fact, as mere human beings, there is really nothing we’re qualified to say about what God is like. All we can do is try to rule out those qualities that are obviously human and obviously, to me at least, not divine.

And in doing so, we may get a glimpse into what is and is not important in our own very human religions.