Sermon

A Radical God

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

April 10, 2005

First Reading: Mark 12:28-34 (NRSV)

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbor as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

Second Reading: H. Richard Niebuhr. Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p. 24.

In ordinary discourse the word “gods” has many meanings. Now we mean by it the powers on which men call for help in time of trouble; now the forces which they summon up in their time of trouble; now the forces which they summon up in their search for ecstasy; now the realities before which they experience awe and the sense of the holy; now the beings they posit in their speculative efforts to explain the origin and government of things; now the objects of adoration. The question whether religion in which all these attitudes and activities are present is a single movement of the mind and with it the query whether the word “gods” refers to entities of one class, must be left to other contexts. We are concerned now with faith as dependence on a value-center and as loyalty to a cause. Hence when we speak of “gods” we mean the gods of faith, namely, such value-centers and causes.

Third Reading: Carl Scovel. Beyond Channing and Church, 2004.

If I understand UU-ism correctly, it is institutionalized Transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism, you may recall, is the belief that each single person’s intuition of the divine (the ultimate, the holy, truth itself) precedes all cultural, societal and institutional forms of religion. That is, the person alone, before and beyond all communities and institutions, knows the basic truth which he or she needs to live by, and that all traditions, teachings, doctrines and counsels or religious communities are important only as guides, supports and challenges, but not as final authorities.

The Transcendentalist theologian is Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his great quote comes from the 1838 Divinity School Address: “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Spirit, cast behind you all conformity and acquaint men (and women) at first hand with Divinity.”

Sermon

The world is a strange place. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago when I happened on an article about Einstein. I doubt there is a better known name in the world. We remember him for his theories of general and special relativity, we remember him for his formula, e=mc², we remember him for the atomic bomb. And even if you don’t remember it, no one would be surprised to know that he won the Nobel Prize for physics. But what would surprise most people is that he didn't win the Noble Price for his work on relativity. They gave him the prize for his work on the photoelectric effect. That may seem odd unless you realize that it was that insight that laid the ground work for quantum physics, an understanding of reality that makes Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz look completely ordinary and everyday. The quantum world is so strange that Einstein spent most of the rest of his trying to disprove it. It was just too weird. But one of the strangest aspects of the quantum world has a parallel with theology - which is what interests me this morning. It is the principle that subatomic particles have no particular location or motion until they are observed. Before observation they exist only as a cloud of possibilities. It seems to me that something similar is true of God - and the “gods.” We can know something of the gods only through faith. Not the faith of belief - which is a trivial matter, but the faith that means fidelity and loyalty, the faith that is about relationship. In this sense I don’t think one can say anything about theology and the gods without talking about relationships.

Think about the question asked of Jesus.

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’

And Jesus answered,

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’

Jesus speaks about God in terms of relationships. He speaks of love. He speaks of giving not just of the soul, but mind and strength as well. These are acts not of belief, but of relationship, acts of loyalty and commitment, acts of trust. All this suggests to me that if we want to try to understand something of what the word God means, God being the most peculiar of all words, that the best place to start is by looking at the nature of relationships. And if that is true in general, then surely it is twice true for Unitarians who are institutionally concerned not with beliefs, but the relationships that create community.

H. Richard Niebuhr is referring to something like this when he says, “We are concerned now with faith as dependence on a value-center and as loyalty to a cause.” I think this is why we use so much relationship language when talking about God and why most of our images of God take anthropomorphic form. And stripped of any sense of the holy, a discussion of the gods is really a discussion of the values and causes in which we trust and to which we pledge our loyalty and allegiance. Tell me where your ultimate loyalty lies, tell me what it is you trust beyond all else and I will tell you the name of your God and the form in which it comes.

There are, of course, many gods. And each of the gods is a unique being. It doesn’t matter if it is the creator god of the bible, the god of the Polynesian volcanoes or the god of nationalism. Each is a unique being, a being among beings. We unitarians often claim we are monotheists - believers in only one God. But the claim of monotheism is complicated by the fact that many among us disdain the word God - leading to the joke often told of Unitarians that we believe in one God - at most. But in reality - notwithstanding all our claims to the contrary - I believe Unitarians - or more accurately, Unitarian Universalists - are, as a general rule, almost uniformly polytheists - believers in many gods; or sometimes henotheists - believers in many gods, but with one God that is the God of all the other gods. If the later seems strange and unusual, rest assured it is not. Does anyone recall what the first of the ten commandments says? “You shall have no other Gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) The God of the ten commandments declares himself to be but one God among many gods. But this God sees himself as first among the gods, as the God of the gods. The Hebrews who worshipped Yahweh were not monotheistic. They were henotheistic.

But why do I claim Unitarian Universalists are polytheistic or henotheistic? Remember what Carl Scovel said? Unitarian Universalism is institutionalized Transcendentalism and Transcendentalism is the idea that each person’s intuition of the divine is supreme, that each person's intuition of the divine is independent of anyone else’s. And it is a weak and flabby person, a lesser being who considers even for a moment what others say of the divine. With such an outlook the object of ultimate value otherwise known as God - that value center to which one pledges one’s heart and mind and soul - is either the self or one’s personal intellectual construct of what constitutes ultimate value. In both cases what we call God is a unique entity - unique meaning different from others. Because they are unique, there are as many gods as there are people. But what are these gods?

For some people they look like the God commonly associated with the bible - an old man in a long white robe who created the Universe. For others it is mother earth or the Goddess. For the strict atheist it may be the self. For a humanistic atheist it may be humanity as a whole that is the center of ultimate value. For some people the center of ultimate value may be the nation. That’s the god of nationalism. And there are as many such gods as there are nations. Some people would say one such nationalistic God rules the others. Then it becomes henotheism. The most extreme form of nationalistic henotheism was the Nazi movement in Germany. But make no mistake: all of these are theological constructions. All of these are examples of the gods. And among Unitarian Universalists on the national level it is most commonly expressed in a Transcendentalism that accepts every person’s God as unique and worthy of worship. It is a theological perspective that dominates much of our movement today, a theological perspective that has significant consequences us. And if you don’t believe me, let me tell how it does.

I’m wondering how many of you have heard of polyamory? It is a movement - a small movement today - that says three or more people should be allowed to enter into a form of group marriage. It is not traditional polygamy, but is similar in some regards. They have approached the Unitarian Universalist Association seeking to formally affiliate and to have our movement endorse their position. It is my belief that the association will have a difficult time telling them no. They will have a difficult time because so much of our movement today is institutionalized Transcendentalism, a movement that has left us - for all practical purposes - mostly polytheistic. And the logical, reasoning result of polytheism is the belief that we must worship all of the gods. Therefore, if someone feels they should be in a polyamorous relationship that becomes a divine mandate and it is the obligation of our movement to bless it because in our movement’s polytheism we have come to worship all the gods. But the consequences are greater than just this example. There is also the problem of every other movement that comes along. The polytheism that is derived from Transcendentalism doesn’t know how to say no because it requires worship of all the gods. And that is why I reject Transcendentalism as it has come down to us and its resultant polytheism.

I believe Emerson was correct that each person has a sense of what I call the divine. I believe that experience of the divine is unique. But I don’t believe the object of that experience is unique. To say it is unique is just another way of saying it is different, which means it is - by necessity - one object of value among many values, one God among many gods.

If we take the polytheistic approach then we are forced into one of two worlds. The first is a world of divided loyalties between values or gods. Will we be loyal to justice or to love? Will we value honesty above all else or life? That’s the famous challenge the philosopher Kant gave us. He imagined a murderer who comes to your door demanding to know the whereabouts of his intended victim. Compelled to answer and knowing the victim’s whereabouts you must choose between the value of honesty that says you should tell the truth or lying to save a life. Which do you choose? The other - when it tends towards henotheism - forces us into a divided loyalty between persons or things. If you declare supreme loyalty to a nation or a god or even humanity, then one’s worth becomes derivative of that loyalty. And what of others? The worth of others is no longer based on your relationship with them, but on their relationship to your object of worship. And if they don’t worship your object, they have no value. The United States becomes the great Satan and its citizens are subject to murder and mayhem. And if you are a judge and you do not rule as a United States Senator wishes, if you don’t rule in a manner that demonstrates loyalty to his center of values, to his God, then you become subject to retribution and it is reasonable and understandable that people are murdering judges. Judges are just getting what they deserve because of their lack of loyalty to the proper God. And even if you value humanity as a whole, then all else becomes subordinate to humanity and disposable. If there are particularly people you don’t like, that’s not a problem - you just say they aren’t really human. You know what I mean: Jews, blacks, Native American Indians, etc., etc., etc. That’s been the easy answer for every aberrant form of humanism since the beginning of time.

But there is another way of understanding the center of value to which one pledges loyalty, another way of understanding the nature of God. It says that each person may have a unique experience of something which we point to with the word God. But the object of that experience is not unique, because if it is unique then it only different, one object, one value, one God among many. Instead it is the underlying unity. This unity is not an entity that loves, it is not an entity that is just, it is not an entity that creates. It is not an entity at all, not a thing at all. Rather it is what Paul Tillich called the ground of all being. It is that from which love arises. It is that from which justice arises. It is that from which the ability to create and creation itself arises. It is not humanity, but that which makes humanity possible. It is not the big bang, but that which makes the big bang possible. It is not any particular value or center of value, but the source of all values. And it is in loyalty to this source of all that is that we can find something that transcends all the lesser gods. It is a radical God, the God of what H. Richard Niebuhr called radical monotheism. It is the God beyond god. It is the God that cannot be named. It is the God that is mystery. All attempts to describe it fail by definition, because if it can be described then it becomes just another entity among entities, just another God among the multitude of gods.

This God beyond the gods is the object of ultimate loyalty. And because it underlies all of existence there is nothing that is beyond it. Therefore, all of existence is good. It does not matter which of the false gods a person worships, all are children of God. That doesn’t mean all is right in the world. But it means there is a world in which even your enemies are deserving of love, a world in which even those you think aren’t human are deserving of love, a world in which dirt and rocks of the field are deserving of love. This is a radical God because it refuses to allow anyone to be the Great Satan. It is a radical God because it overwhelms all pettiness, all efforts to see the world as divided into a multitude of separate and competing kingdoms. It is the God that is worthy of love with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind and all my strength. I believe this was the God of Jesus. I think it was why he said that to love your neighbor as yourself was like loving God. But that last statement cannot be fully understood unless you know that to Jesus everyone is your neighbor - an idea that I believe can be true only if God is a radical God, the God beyond god.

And this radical God is not easy to accept. It cannot be seen. It cannot be named. Any attempt to describe it must - by definition - fail, because if it can be described in particular, then it must be but an entity among entities, one God among the multitude of gods. To commit to such a radical God requires what Soren Kierkegaard called the “leap of faith.” This is not the faith of blind, unquestioning belief. Blind, unquestioning and unthinking belief is what the lesser gods require. It is the faith of relationships, the faith of commitment and trust and loyalty. And it is a reasoning faith, a reasoning commitment, a reasoning trust, and a reasoning loyalty.

For centuries I believe Unitarianism has been commonly misunderstood as the rejection of the Trinity. This negative understanding says Unitarians are the people who are against something. I believe this misunderstanding is almost universal, both within and without our movement. But I don’t think that’s true Unitarianism. I think genuine Unitarianism is not the rejection of the Trinity, but the insistence on the unity of God, a unity that is expressed in radical monotheism.

I do not know what you believe. I do not know the center of your values. I do not know what it is to which you pledge your ultimate trust and commitment. But this is where mine is. It is what I serve among you. I leave you with this question. What is it you serve? Where is your loyalty? To what are you faithful? I believe this is the eternal question.

Amen.