Who or what is God?

Rev. Nathan Ryan
July 7, 2013

How do we understand the most holy in a church where there is no creedal test and not everyone is a theist? Guest minister Rev. Nathan Ryan leads us through this three letter journey. He is assistant minister at the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge. He has also served as director of lay ministry for the First Unitarian Church of Dallas and director of lifespan religious education at Live Oak UU Church in Cedar Park.

I remember feeling very angry and I didn’t know why. It was the first year I was in high school. It was red ribbon week. This is the week when the school decks out in red ribbons in an attempt to dissuade students from using drugs. Each student group was responsible for putting up signs with an anti-drug message. Most groups didn’t do it, but the one that really got to me put up signs all over the school saying things like “Jesus loves you” and “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it with drugs.”

I remember feeling very angry, almost violated when I saw these signs. I turned to my friend in exasperation about it. I lashed out at the signs and said something like “They can’t do this. What if I put up a sign that said “don’t do drugs because there is no god.” ” My friend didn’t really understand my anger and just continued on with what he was doing.

If I wanted to find the easy explanation of my emotion, the intellectual part of me could say that I was offended because these groups violated the separation of church and state or that I was upset because these messages were exclusive to atheists, Jews, Muslims, agnostics and anyone else who wasn’t a believer in this specific brand of Christianity. And those thoughts and justifications aren’t wrong.

But didn’t explain why I had such an emotional reaction, a reaction out of anger and sadness, and it doesn’t explain why I still hold this story in my consciousness to this day.

I think deep down I was upset because I didn’t have the cultural or spiritual understanding I needed to fully comprehend God as a concept or as an experience. I didn’t grow up with an understanding of God, not one that was real and meaningful to me. I knew about the God described in popular culture, a god that had no resonance with me. But I never in a religious context had the opportunity to explore my own understandings of God.

I knew of “their God” – the old white man with the beard who orchestrates and judges. Because I didn’t believe in him, I knew that I must not believe in God. As I got older my understanding of and relationship with God has grown and adapted and shifted.

The experiences of God came first and it was only later did I come to identify those experiences as God. Let me say that another way. I had experiences and feelings but I didn’t have the words to describe them. It was only later, as an adult, when I started learning about an expansive description of God, not the constricted God of my childhood, did I start identifying these feelings and experiences as divine in nature.

Some of those experiences: My time as a Unitarian Universalist youth – a time when I felt fully embraced by a community of caring and loving peers who encouraged me to discover and embrace my true self. This was at a time that it didn’t feel safe in my day to day life to figure out who I truly was. There were there friends and family who grew up in awful circumstances, friends who were surrounded by neglect and mental illness and addiction, and yet they were able to explore and know themselves and thrive.

There was the incredible dedication of a chaplain and nurse when I worked in the hospital who gave up hours to sit with a patient whose family had already left him in his last hours declaring to me that no one deserves to die alone. There are those tectonic shifts, towards a more just world, like the one we are experiencing now with LGBT rights. There are people who work for greater dialogue, who work for justice, who love those who seem unworthy of love. All of these experiences I would have described as divine, but it took a shift in my understanding to ever see them as the work of God.

I wanted to explore this topic with you today for two reasons. First, God and our interpretations of God permeate our culture so much that we, as a religious institution are called to explore it. Second, I think a lot of religious insight can be opened up by further exploration.

The aha moment for me about understanding God came when I switched the agency. That is to say, I stopped looking at God as the initiator of events, the person who pulls the switch to make it rain, or make us love, or who allows people to live and to die. I flipped it and saw god as the descriptor of these larger things.

The words of poet Annie Dillard describe this what God looks like after this shift. I don’t like her dismissive attitude or one gendered description of god, but the imagery is so useful that I wanted to share it with you.

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things- unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

This helped me greatly. Instead of seeing God as the cause of love, when I see love, I call it god. Just as when I see water fall from the sky I call it rain instead of saying that rain caused water to fall from the sky. Because God is such a powerfully deep and complicated metaphor, I think its ok to see God in many different ways (or not at all) and that strengthens the concept for me. Here are a few and I’ll ask you to try some on.

The early 20th century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams says God is “that which ultimately concerns humanity” or god is “that in which we should place our confidence.” Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church from the reading earlier says that god is “that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” I see god I as the culmination of all of our understandings of something larger.

Take the lesson from earlier. How many of you found the words of people inadequate to describe art? Our best means of communication can pale in comparison to the fullness of experiencing art. And art is just an abstraction of something larger. Art is an attempt to communicate a feeling, an experience, a way of being that is indescribable. That is why often the artistic depiction of real life fail to fully embrace life’s the majesty and mystery. So here is the trajectory: Words are inadequate to describe art. Art is inadequate to describe life. Life is inadequate to describe our own musings and worries and ways of making meaning. If you carry this continuum all the way through to its conclusion, to the infinite most point, that is where I would call God.

Another way I see God, came out of our earlier reading by Emerson. What was so revolutionary about Emerson’s sermon to the Divinity School students at Harvard was that it took God out of the scriptures, out of the past and the books, and it located God squarely within each person. He put the obligation of knowing the divine and understanding revelation into our very existence.

I see God as the culmination of all of our understandings of the world, our understandings of good and evil and fun and suffering. But it is larger than that. It is all of the understandings of everyone and everything that has ever existed – including those who can’t make meaning.

So one conception of God, lets put on the horizontal axis, is the grandness and majesty of life. The culminated God concepts of everyone who has ever existed could go on the vertical axis, and you could continue adding dimensions to this. It is easy to poke holes in someone else’s conception of God and their beliefs. Beliefs are just our attempts to make sense of our experiences. To argue with someone’s beliefs is to argue with someone’s experiences.

We are all making two-dimensional representations of a concept that is three dimensional. When you do that, like when making a map, you aren’t going to get all the proportions right. If you are mapping on a piece of paper a round world either South America or Greenland is going to be the wrong size.

If we were to view God as the culmination of all of our experiences and beliefs, what is implied by that? First it implies that God is not out there. God is not some foreign substance or entity. We are a part of the great makeup of all existence. It also implies that revelation and the ability to change the world is no farther than right inside of us. It implies to borrow the concept from Howard Thurman in our invocation that each of us has an altar deep in our souls, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword and that is our link to the eternal. Second it implies that what we say and do matters. This is where I depart from Forrest Church in our first reading. I don’t know how many of you know Reverend Church’s story. He did some great things, he grew a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York from a small church into one of the largest congregations in the country. He spoke words, and wrote many books that gave hope to countless people. His book Love and Death may have helped me understand death better than anything else I’ve read.

In his reading, though, he dismissed his critics by saying “To think that I, who will never be guilty of committing a best-seller, could strike anyone as being sufficiently powerful to set back liberal religion even a decade.” Well, the shadow side of Rev. Church’s ministry was that because of his alcoholism and an affair, he hurt a lot of people. He hurt a lot of people partially because he didn’t understand the power of his own words and actions. If we are part of a larger conception of God, then our thoughts are significant. Our experiences, our insights are holy plasma.

I make paper cranes. This practice for me lies somewhere in between a deep spiritual and meditative practice and a way to manage my fidgety hands. I take a sheet of paper, a two dimensional sheet of paper. I fold it over and over until it turns into a crane, into something with depth.

This is a great practice for me, but with one unforeseen side effect. I have hundreds of these cranes all over my house. Because I am so used to them I forget that other people can treasure these.

The spiritual challenge of a god that is the culmination of everyone’s meaning and present in each is similar to the challenge of folding cranes. Your life is a life worthy of study a life worthy of hanging in a museum. Your years of experiences and insights and attempts to make meaning is each a fold in the paper. All of your work trying to learn to walk, and talk, and love, and experience life give this life depth and dimension and complexity.

Eventually you might reach a point where your gifts, your insights, your way of being in the world are so plentiful that they might stop feeling like gifts that other appreciate, and they just seem to you like hundreds of cranes all over your house.

If I had a better understanding of God when I was in high school, I may not have been so angry when I saw those signs at red ribbon week. I’m still not sure I’d be happy they were up, but I could process them with a better understanding. That sign that said “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it,” I wonder how that idea would have changed my life if I could receive it. I mean that idea is basically what I’m espousing, that our bodies hold great and meaningful pieces of God, that we are made up of star dust, particles that have existed since the beginning of time.

If I was more at peace with God, I might have opened me up to more people I knew in high school. And then they might have found the life changing and healing message of our faith – I know of at least three who are now Unitarian Universalist.

I wonder how many people who walked past those signs wished they could hear that their doubts and their questions made their faith stronger not weaker? I wonder how many would have been eased to know that they were worthy of love and kindness and that they were a blessing to the world. In the most concrete of senses, I wonder how many of my peers in high school could have had their lives transformed if I were able to share this church with them.

I’ll close this sermon with maybe one of my favorite definitions of God. It comes straight out of the Christian scriptures. It’s from 1 John Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God….No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and love is made complete. Let us go out and live a more loving more caring life. Amen.

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776