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© Davidson Loehr
22 September 2002
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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INVOCATION:
What better place than a church to wonder about the existence of God! These are questions you can hardly raise in polite society. You probably wouldn’t feel comfortable raising them in most churches, either. But here, we’re safe, and our questions are safe. All of them. It’s one way we know that
It is a sacred time, this
And a sacred place, this:
A place for questions more profound than answers,
Vulnerabilities more powerful than strength,
And a peace that can pass all understanding.
It is a sacred time, this:
Let us begin it together in song.
PRAYER
We pray not to something, but from something,
to which we must give voice;
not to escape from our life, but to focus it;
not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.
We pray that we may live with honesty:
that we can accept who we are,
and admit who we are not;
that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear
that we ignore the still small voices within us,
that could lead us out of darkness.
We pray that we can live with trust and openness:
to those people, those experiences, and those transformations
that can save us from narrowness and despair.
And we pray on behalf of these hopes
with an open heart, an honest soul,
and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.
Amen.
SERMON: What if there really were a God?
What if there really were a God?
That’s probably the first time you ever heard that question asked in a sermon! Did you ever wonder why? Why do churches, synagogues, mosques and seminaries so studiously avoid this most obvious, most fundamental, question?
Maybe there’s something vaguely offensive about wondering, in church, whether there is or isn’t a God. Maybe something blasphemous, like there are church rules and one of them is that churches are supposed to tell people, above all else, that there is a God, then tell them what that God promises them and asks from them.
Like you don’t know, but ministers know because we went to preacher school, and in one of those courses – a hidden, secret course that you people don’t get to take – we learned the secrets about what God is and what God wants and so now we come out here to enlighten you, and you pay us for it.
If that were true, it would be easier just to offer that special secret course to all of you, so we could eliminate the middleman and we wouldn’t have to keep meeting like this. Unfortunately, no one has met or seen these gods, and those who do claim to talk to God are usually locked quickly away. There are no photos, videos or DVDs. It’s all just hearsay evidence. What we have are the stories and histories told by religious scriptures and historical sources.
So how do we find out whether there’s a god, and what it’s like? We can’t take a television crew out the way some have gone hunting for Big Foot or UFO’s . We know there would be nothing to photograph, no one to interview.
In seminaries and divinity schools, preachers look in books, like bibles. But one thing we learn in those courses is that religious scriptures don’t answer as many questions as you might hope.
The Bible makes the matter more confusing, not less. Judaism has been monotheistic since around 539 BCE, after their Babylonian captivity. But earlier stories in the Bible show that the early Hebrews worshiped several gods and goddesses – if you didn’t know that, it shows you haven’t been reading your bible.
Scholars have said that Jahweh was modeled after a tribal chief. Others have shown that the covenant between God and the Hebrews found in the Bible was modeled directly after international Hittite treaty formulas of over three thousand years ago, where the kings demanded exclusive allegiance to keep people from serving other kings, in return for protection. So from one angle, this whole God-business can be seen as a kind of protection racket.
The Canaanite religion, from which some scholars believe the Hebrews took their entire religion, was a nature religion, and the most important deity was the goddess Asherah or Astarte. So she was older than God.
Even Solomon in the Bible praised this goddess, and his son Rehoboam erected an image of her in the temple at Jerusalem. Even the Ten Commandments acknowledge that the Hebrews have other gods; they just insist that Jahweh be the number one God (The first commandment says, ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me.”)
And in Mecca, the center of the religion of Islam, the famous black stone there is thought to have been originally sacred to the Arabian goddess al-Uzza, the “mighty one” whose shrine was at Mecca until Islam suppressed this ancient goddess worship. So the goddess al-Uzza was older than Allah.
This means the question is not only what do we mean by the word God, but which God do we mean, of all that were worshiped: the newer one, or the more ancient ones? It seems the older gods and goddesses were there first. And if we’re seeking the more ancient gods rather than the latecomers, we want to look for the original deities.
Well, goddess worship was first, and it was practiced throughout the ancient world, all the way back to more than 30,000 years ago in Paleolithic times.
At those early times, carved goddess images outnumber male gods by ten to one. Inanna, the chief goddess of the Mesopotamian cultures where the ancient Hebrews lived, goes back to at least 3900 BCE, nearly six thousand years ago, long before anyone began telling stories about the much later God of the Bible. Maybe Inanna is God?
She was the principal deity in the first urban society of Uruk. Inanna was later and elsewhere known as Ishtar, Astarte, and worshiped by the early Hebrew people as Asherah. And she was almost certainly far more ancient. Lots of small goddess statues from 10,000 years ago have been found in the Jericho region. So is that what we need to mean by the original God? A goddess?
It was in the case of the Hebrews, and it seems to have been for the Greeks as well. The primary mystery religion of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries, concerned Demeter, the mother goddess, and her holy daughter Persephone, who was raised from the dead. Here is a mother and daughter god, long before the Christian story emerged of a father and son god.
The Egyptian goddess Nut, the sky goddess, was the mother of all deities, and the goddess Isis was called ‘the oldest of the old,” the one who made the universe spin. In Greece, it was Cybele who was the mother of all deities, and Tyche, or “fate,” was an Aegean goddess far more ancient than Zeus. And the Greeks always considered the fates to be more powerful than Zeus. So the ancient and apparently original goddess was still regarded as superior to Zeus even in the age of classical Greece.
Going farther around the world to Japan, the Shinto religion teaches that the world was created by a divine creator couple, the god Izanagi and goddess Izanani. They gave birth to the sun goddess Amaterasu, and up through WWII in ‘the land of the rising sun,” the Japanese emperor was seen as her descendent.
Everywhere we look to discover the original god, we find that before the gods there were goddesses. As an article in the Encyclopedia of Religion has put it, “In the lands that brought forth Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God was first worshiped as a woman.”
When we look into the history of civilizations, we find that the emergence of virtually every civilization was associated in some way with goddess worship. The phenomena of goddess worship is unbroken from Paleolithic times more than 30,000 years ago.
Many have thought that all goddesses were just symbols for fertility and feminine things, but that’s not true. They have symbolized everything imaginable. Throughout the ancient world, these goddesses represented rule, judgment, control, fate, writing, war, healing, ethics, morals, truth, architecture and building, as well as fertility, and the creation of all life on earth.
These goddesses weren’t dainty ladies, and they seldom needed men. In Greece, the goddess Athena was the goddess of war, and the protector of all the military heroes.
If we look for the original God, we find it wasn’t a god but a goddess, everywhere. But though that may be true, it doesn’t answer our real question. Whether a god or a goddess, what is it? Where or how does it exist? How can we investigate it in a cool objective way?
When we look at what religions have to say about their gods, it isn’t much help.
Take the religion of Islam. It’s the newest of the three main Western religions, with the most recent word on the subject of God, or Allah. But when you check the Encyclopedia of Religion, it says Islamic scholars agree on only two points about God:
1. First, the essence of God exists.
2. Second, the only other thing you can say is that this essence is eternal, and is not like any created things.
There are great differences of opinion on all else in Muslim thought. So God exists, has no physical or visible form and nothing else about this God can be known for certain – except, as one famous line says, they teach that God is closer to you than the jugular vein in your neck.
And in the Hebrew bible, the authors are clear that God can not be pictured, sculpted, seen, or even named – though again, one famous line says that God sometimes comes to us in a ‘s till, small voice.”
If this is all the hard data we have, it’s hard to make much of a case for the existence of God. There’s a famous philosophical puzzle used to address this question of the existence of God:
I tell you there is a dragon in your garage.
Well, you say, I don’t believe you, so I”ll open the door and prove it to you.
Ah, I say, that’s good, but you see it’s an invisible dragon.
An invisible dragon, you say. Very well, then you”ll spread flour all over your garage floor, and his footprints will show.
Another very good idea, I say, but you see this is an incorporeal invisible dragon. It doesn’t have a body, and doesn’t leave footprints.
Does this dragon breathe fire like real dragons do? You ask.
Oh yes, I say, this dragon breathes fire.
Very well, you say, then you will hang thermometers, and you will set up an infrared camera, and they will show whether or not there is any invisible and incorporeal source of heat in your garage.
Once again, I commend you for your good ideas, but must point out that the fire this dragon breathes is the same temperature as the air around it, and it doesn’t create any wind.
About now, you realize that there doesn’t seem to be any difference between my invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon, and no dragon at all! A dragon that can’t make a difference in our world doesn’t need to make a difference in our minds either, you say.
So perhaps this is it. Every religion says their God, or goddess, can’t be seen, doesn’t have a body, doesn’t exist as we do, can’t be detected by human means, and can’t be described by human words. Then perhaps God is like the invisible, incorporeal, undetectable dragon. There’s nothing there at all, it doesn’t exist, and we’re wasting a lot of time thinking and preaching about it. The majority of Americans and the vast majority of Europeans don’t go to church any more, after all. It looks like that’s what they”ve decided, and maybe you”re convinced too. So maybe that’s it: the word “God” is useless and we should stop using it.
Picking up the other end of the stick
And yet” yet something about this isn’t satisfying. Even though I agree with the logic of all the arguments, something is still missing. Because I have these feelings, and I am betting that you have similar feelings, that I still need to account for. I feel that I’m somehow part of something much bigger, that things like truth, justice, love, even though they”re invisible, are terribly real. And I need a way to call forth these feelings of connection to the larger context of which I feel myself a part. I feel that it makes demands on me, this larger context, that some ways of living are better than others, and that the best way to live is in harmony with the noblest and proudest values I can call forth. I even want to feel that I’m living in a way that serves these ideals and values, that they almost command me, that I’m more whole and authentic when I live in harmony with them, and less so when I don’t.
What are they? For me, they”re feelings of a need for connection, a call for me to become a person of character, a kind of blessing to my little part of the world. That’s almost a magical way to speak, but it’s how I feel.
And it doesn’t stop there. Other things also fill me with feelings and yearnings I can’t explain. Birth, whether the birth of a human baby, a puppy, or a baby bird from an egg, seems miraculous to me. The beauty of sunrises and flowers, the feel of rain and a gentle wind.
On any day, we can look up in the sky and see amazing machines that let humans fly. But while that’s interesting and convenient, it doesn’t impress me as much as the fact that a fly can fly. That I don’t understand at all. The myriad miracles of nature often leave me breathless. And so many more things!
Unexpected kindnesses from strangers: why do they do that? And you and I do it too: why do we do it? And how kids grow up into adults who have the same kinds of hopes, dreams and fears that you and I have.
The amazing sameness of people, such that I can read wise writings from three thousand years ago written by people living in a completely different kind of world than I, and they speak to me, I recognize all their human yearnings and hopes and fears and pains. That’s amazing to me. It makes me believe that we are all somehow connected, all somehow one, and I want to know more about how that is, and how it works.
And music; music is a miracle to me. I don’t understand how Mozart did it. I don’t even understand how Stan Getz or Charlie Parker did it. How can a few well-chosen notes, hummed, plucked or bowed, have such emotional impact, and affect so many people in similar ways?
It is as though, invisibly, everywhere, there are forces that connect us, that stir our souls, that can open our little worlds and our hearts until we want to learn how to strengthen those connections we feel, how to create bonds of compassion and love rather than remaining so separated by ignorance or indifference.
When I am open to it, when I will have the humility to be awakened and moved, an entirely different quality of life seems possible for me and those whose lives I can touch. And I want it, I want that bigger, fuller, more connected world.
The awareness of those connections, these powers, makes me feel unfinished. There is a tendency in me – I think it’s in you, in nearly everyone – that wants to take life more seriously and deeply, that wants to grow into a fuller kind of humanity.[1]
Or is it growing into a quality of divinity that I’m after? Words fail here. These powers and connections are bigger than I, they seem eternal while I’m merely transient. I can’t control them, they seem to be the enduring rules for living. I feel enlarged when I become aware of these greater possibilities. And I feel small in comparison with them. I’m born, live and die, they seem to last forever.
You all know these things, you know what I’m trying to talk about, though you may have different ways of putting them. Not only that, I think you value them much as I do. I think you have, as I do, high opinions of those people you have known who have felt these larger aspirations and tried to respond to them.
There is a drive in us to become conscious of and grow toward relating our own life to the lives of others and the forces in the world that seem most life-giving, most sacred.[2]
And what shall we call these drives, these powers, these still small voices? They”re invisible, incorporeal, not like us, not like anything we can see or touch, yet so important. Shall we call these connections Mother? Father? Nature? Shall we call them God? Through time, we have called them all these things, and more.
Something here is so very real. Even if we aren’t sure what to call it, we must try to call it forth, you know?
Now see where we have arrived in this morning’s journey. We started by asking what if there really were a God, and realize it’s not the right question. Almost immediately, that question dissolved into others.
But now, by giving voice to some of the enduring questions and yearnings we seem to share with all people who have ever lived, we have arrived at a special, even a sacred, place. It is that place of awareness within us which is the womb that gave birth to God, the birthplace of all our gods and goddesses. And we find that in this womb are questions more profound than answers, vulnerabilities more powerful than strength, and a peace that can pass all understanding.[3]
There’s another paragraph from the Encyclopedia of Religion that fits here, though it sounds a little academic:
“In human religious experience, manifestations of sacred power provide centers of meaning, order, worship and ethics. Humans have always felt that real life is in close contact with sacred power. Ideas and experiences of these powers, [usually expressed as goddesses or gods], thus are not so much intellectual reflections as existential concerns, revolving around the fundamental human question of how to live authentically in this world”. Their power meets human existence precisely at the most vital and crucial areas of life, in connection with such matters as food, fertility, protection, birth, and death. The fact that [we assign] personality and will [to our divine beings] means that human existence is not just aimless and haphazard but is related to the sacred pattern created or structured by the will of the gods and goddesses.”[4]
If you look seriously at religions, at every religion in which people have ever had faith, you”ll find that many of them are now dead, and their teachings have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories. For many people, the same is true of Western religions. But when we examine the original elements, can’t we see that this dead rock was once the molten outpourings of an inner fire, a fire that we also share? Religions are the sum of all relations humans have felt to the enduring forces of life and the universe. By whatever names their gods or goddesses are called, it is this reconnection we have tried to call forth.[5]
And what shall we call these feelings we have, feelings that there is more to us, that there are more noble possibilities for our lives and our world? Shall we call them messengers from a higher power? The angels of our better nature? Holy spirits? We meet like this in churches to explore life’s most important questions. But today, we started with the wrong question. All religions have been clear that their gods don’t exist like we do. Looking for them through history or archaeology is a dead-end. The gods aren’t archaeological or physical realities. They”re psychological realities. And the feelings, fears, hopes and yearnings that continue to give birth to the gods are so deep in our souls that we wouldn’t be fully human without them.
The real question isn’t about God. It’s “What if these feelings we have are real?” These yearnings for more, these feelings that we are really a part of all of this – of one another, of the world, and the yearning to be more connected, more whole. What if those yearnings are real? Sometimes they seem the most deeply real things about us.
And as long as that’s true, we should probably keep meeting like this.
——————
[1] Adapted from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, pp. 11-12, where he argues that religion comes from ‘the human tendency” that wants to take life seriously, to grow to our full humanity.
[2] Schleiermacher says the drive to becoming religious “is only the endeavor to become conscious of and to exhibit the grue relation of our own life to the common nature of man.” (Ibid., p. 149)
[3] Schleiermacher puts it this way: “”Man in closest fellowship with the highest must be for you all an object of esteem, nay, of reverence. No one capable of understanding such a state can, when he sees it, withhold this feeling. That is past all doubt. You may despise all whose minds are easily and entirely filled with trivial things, but in vain you attempt to depreciate one who drinks in the greatest for his nourishment. You may love him or hate him, according as he goes with you or against in the narrow path of activity and culture, but even the most beautiful feeling of equality you cannot entertain towards a person so far exalted above you. The seeker for the Highest Existence in the world stands above all who have not a like purpose.” (p. 210).
[4] Theodore M. Ludwig, “Gods and Goddesses,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion, volume 6, pp. 59ff.)
[5] Schleiermacher: “I invite you to study every faith professed by man, every religion that has a name and a character. Though it may long ago have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories, will you not, when you examine the original elements at the source, find that this dead dross was once the molten outpourings of the inner fire? Is there not in all religions more or less of the true nature of religion, as I have presented it to you? Must not, therefore, each religion be one of the special forms which mankind, in some region of the earth and at some stage of development, has to accept?”
“the whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life. In this sense there is but one religion.” (pp. 216-217)
