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“Beyond
Make-Believe: The Strength of Liberal Faith in Time of Crisis.”
INTRODUCTION: In his book, God, Prayer, and Spirituality,
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt tells of the secular Jewish family who moved from
New York City to a small town in another state: “They enrolled their
child in the best school in the area, a Catholic parochial school. To
their dismay, their son came home after the first day and said, ‘Daddy,
you’ll never guess what I learned today.’ Dad smiled, and said, ‘What’s
that, David?’ His son answered, ‘Did you know that God is really three;
that there is a Father, a Son and a Holy Ghost; and that it’s called the
Trinity?’ The suddenly distraught secular Jewish father gently sat his
son down, looked him in the eyes, and said, ‘David, let me make it
clear: There is no such thing as the Trinity. There is only one
God.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘Oh! One other thing: We
don’t believe in Him either.’”
TRANSITION.
Last Sunday, as one of our participants was leaving the service, she
expressed appreciation for the sermon, but then she said, “But what
about God?” It was an excellent question and one that is always relevant
to the Unitarian quest for religious self-understanding. But to answer
it, let’s first do a little Unitarian history.
THE UNITARIAN QUEST.
When Jesus died in what we now call the first century of the Common Era
(A.C.E.), all of his followers were practicing Jews. They went to the
synagogue on the Sabbath – Friday sundown through Saturday sundown – and
then those Jews who were also followers of Jesus met together the next
day, Sunday, on what was the first day of the week, both to break bread
and to remember Jesus: Saturday, they observed the Sabbath; Sunday, they
remembered Jesus.
But this practice was not smooth in any sense. Many of the rabbis
strongly resisted the emphasis by Christian Jews upon what Jesus said or
did; and equally important, the Jews who were also Jesus followers, were
themselves even more divided by how to explain the relationship of Jesus
to God. Was he anything more than a great prophet and teacher; and if
so, what?...since they only believed in one God? Let me ask that again:
To the early Jews who were also followers of Jesus – Christian Jews, not
Jewish Christians – the big question they struggled with, “Was Jesus
anything more than a great prophet and teacher; and if so, what?…what in
the context of their believing in only one God?”
Their uncertainty was pervasive. Even as the Christian message spread
for the next 300 years across the Middle East, Europe and into Africa,
there was constant internecine strife among Christians, some of whom
believed Jesus was a demi-god, that he was a man whom God invaded, that
he was somehow both God and man, and on the options went, so much so
that conflicts between differing views were at times quite deadly.
Finally, the government got involved, after the Emperor Constantine
converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. He
immediately abolished the persecution of Christians that had been
unceasing since Emperor Nero blamed Christians for Rome’s burning. Next,
the new convert found the arguments among the Christians intolerable. So
in the year 325 A.C.E., Emperor Constantine called an
empire-wide-council to meet in the city of Nicea, for one specific
reason: To bring order to the chaos that existed in the church about the
relationship of Jesus to God. So bear with me just a moment as we do
ancient theology.
Here’s an excerpt of what the bishops and theologians wrote and decided
at Nicea. Remember, its purpose is to solve the problem of who Jesus was
in relation to the Jewish God they believed in. We call it the Nicene
Creed:
We
believe in one God…and in one Lord
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father….
The phrase “begotten of the Father” was important, because earlier, very
popular creeds, such as the Apostles Creed, said nothing about Jesus
being begotten. Rather, they had said things such as, Jesus was
“conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”
To the theologians this was a big difference. Though we don’t use
“begat” or “begot” in common English today, it technically always refers
to procreation by the Father. So in theological talk, it was God the
Father who begat Jesus; it was God the Holy Spirit who conceived or
inseminated Mary; and it was Mary who gave birth to Jesus.
While this seems very arcane to us from this distance, the reality is
that it was literally a matter of life and death to early Christians.
How could God include Jesus without being more than one God, as Judaism
had always taught? The Trinity was the solution they created as opposed
to a variation of the Unitarian option which was also on the table at
the time (Arianism).
Scrolling forward, we also know from this vantage point that in the 7th
century in the Middle East, another young prophet named Muhammad arose,
who was influenced by both Christian and Jewish scriptures. He felt that
God had given him a series of revelations that also resolved the issue
of who Jesus was. Muhammad reported that God had revealed the Qur’an
directly to him, and in that revelation, God had made clear that “there
is no God but God”…that is, no Son of God…no Jesus Christ sitting on the
right hand of God the Father. No, there was only one God as had been
revealed to Moses, Adam, Abraham and others. Rather, Jesus was a great
prophet. The revelation of the Qur’an which Muhammad was given
was intended to resolve these problems and bring Jews and Christians
together. We know how well that worked out then and now.
Meanwhile, in the Western world, which means basically everything West
of Rome, the Bishop of Rome or the Pope, was the magisterium or
the teaching authority of the church. What that meant was that the Pope
was in charge of settling theological differences in churches. That
worked, for better or worse, until the 16th century, when a
German monk named Martin Luther decided it wasn’t good enough. He
brought about a revolution or reformation in the church that led to the
formation of protesting churches. And once the teaching authority of the
Bishop of Rome was challenged, a floodgate of differing ideas broke
loose, including the ancient questions about the relationship of Jesus
to God. For our purposes though (otherwise this becomes a church history
lesson rather than a sermon), let’s scroll forward almost 300 years to
Boston, King’s Chapel, 1785, when they took all references to the
Trinity out of the Book of Common Prayer. Then 20 years later, at the
start of the 19th century, Harvard Divinity School became
Unitarian, and was organized and endowed by Unitarians until it became
nondenominational in 1878. In the process, a significant number of
Congregational churches became Unitarian, allowing William Ellery
Channing in 1825 to found the American Unitarian Association.
But the emphasis upon Jesus among Unitarians gradually eroded, so much
so that more than half of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto in 1931
were Unitarians; and in 1973, the second Humanist Manifesto was the work
of mostly Unitarians (our own Dr. Joanne Boydston was asked to sign but
was out of the country and couldn’t be reached in time; incidentally,
she did make a substantive contribution to our new facility, even though
she lives in Naples). For many, humanism and Unitarianism were the same.
But by the time that I joined First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City in
January 1990, that presumption was under siege. Because more and more,
we were recognizing that atheism and humanism are in fact simply another
religious self-understanding, but without appealing to the existence of
any deity.
Then when All Faiths formed in 2001, the question arose implicitly among
us, why can’t we have a congregation that includes atheists and
humanists, along with those whose roots and heritages are Christians,
Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews? Why couldn’t we use the historic
Unitarian and Universalist commitments to openness and inquiry to
construct a spiritual center for people of all faiths, including both
those whose self-understanding includes the use of the word “God” and
those for whom it doesn’t?
But if we did that, what would we believe that could include both
atheists and theists, as well as those in between? Here’s the liberal
religious answer I’ve reached which I extend for your consideration:
1. To be of liberal religious faith
is not to believe that we have apprehended the truth, but that we have
been apprehended by truth-seeking.
Let me repeat that
please: To be of liberal faith is to believe we have been apprehended by
truth-seeking, not that we have apprehended the truth.
I’m fully aware that not to have a creed
which captures the truth is difficult sometimes to live with. I still
remember vividly the moment in my first year of graduate school at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, lying wide awake far past my
bedtime struggling with the dawning new reality of my
faith-understanding. From the time I had first entered undergraduate
school as a freshman and begun to struggle with the differences between
what I was taught there and what I had been taught at church, my secret
solution was to believe that ultimately I would find a book or a teacher
or someone who would help me to find a way to “really” believe so that I
wouldn’t have to give up my faith. Otherwise, I would lose my
relationships to family, to friends and colleagues of a lifetime. But in
the silence of that night, I knew that I knew that I knew:
n
The Bible which I had read
over and over, and even spent three years learning Greek so as to be
able to translate it myself, it was not at all what I read or was told
it was.
n
And upon dying, the heaven
awaiting filled with mansions and gold streets and angelic choirs –
those were fairy tales told by virtually every religion.
n
And God? He wasn’t sitting
on a throne benevolently watching over this little planet. And for
certain, He didn’t love me so much that he had sent his only son to die
for me.
Even though the
weather was warm outside, inside I felt cold and alone. The life of
piety, informed by the beliefs lovingly taught me by my father and
mother, my bible college teachers, and my friends of a lifetime, whose
opinion I valued – it was no longer an option. In those kind of
situations, to whom, to what do we turn?
Strangely enough, while lying there I
remembered the very first sermon I preached. I was in my late teens and
the guest speaker at a youth service at the Agnew Pentecostal Holiness
Church in Oklahoma City. The sermon text I chose was from the Gospel
of John, chapter 8, verse 32: You shall know the truth, and the
truth shall set you free.
Although I didn’t recognize the import
of that recollection at the time, in hindsight I realize now as I lay on
my bed, I was apprehended – not by any of the beliefs with which I had
struggled and sought so hard to believe – rather, I was captured by
truth-seeking. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set
you free.”
2. As
truth-seekers, we believe in the Mystery of human existence. To
speak of “Mystery” is not to describe a problem to be solved, but a
Reality to be accepted. Life in this Universe and on this planet is a
Mystery. If that be so, then the religious question we face is, how do
we go about addressing the encompassing Mystery before which we all
stand? What ritual, what liturgy, what prayer, what meditation? Do we
kneel, do we stand, do we prostrate ourselves? Should we find a place of
silence? Should we seek a source of solace? And when we do what do we
say? What words do we utter?
3. That’s where
religion comes in. It provides the scripts by which to address the
Mystery.
It’s in poetic
form, and sometimes so dense that it’s hard to grasp, like the Nicene
Creed describing the relationship of Jesus to God, 300 years after his
death:
We believe in one Lord
Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father, God
of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being
of one substance with the Father….
Wow! They couldn’t
find any other way to communicate the transformation that the life and
teachings of Jesus had brought into their lives. So they resorted to
poetry…heavy duty theological poetry:
…God of
God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of
one substance with the Father…
And as those before
and those who come after, we too join in addressing the Mystery with the
poetry of faith. It’s as though there is an Ultimate Reality around
which we are all encircled…all six plus billion persons on Earth, and
those who have gone before us as well. We peer into the reality before
us and we see it through the lens of our history and our heritage. That
may include a poetic affirmation that includes God, Jesus, or Muhammad.
But poetry,
nonetheless. And when we human beings are confronted with ultimate kinds
of questions…birth, adolescence, marriage, illness, aging, and death…one
of the vocabularies available to us is the poetry of faith. It may be
the poetry of Judaism…or of its offspring, Christianity…or both their
offspring in Islam. It may be humanism. Or it may be another of the many
faiths we employ in life.
But remember: No matter how much I want
to say, “This is the way the world is…This is the way the world is,”
when all is said and done, the Mystery remains. The poetic expression I
have used may well be wonderfully reflective of reality at that moment.
Repeating its affirmations and joining in its rituals may strengthen us
to live in the confidence that we can make it through tomorrow’s
tomorrows. Regardless, we live by faith that we can survive both the
seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the visible and the
unvisible.
Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.
Amen. Blessed Be.
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