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God Talk
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Kenneth Torquil MacLean,
Minister Emeritus
on September 7, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
There is so much here for me to feel grateful for: the windows, this room,
this pulpit, Roger’s gracious invitations for me to come back, the music, the
flowers, getting to know Susan and knowing that the strong tradition of
religious education at Cedar Lane remains strong, welcoming Terry Ellen to
Cedar Lane’s ministry, and, most of all, this community of people.
One of the qualities we all look for in our leaders—political, religious,
or whatever—is decisiveness. Recently I picked up a wonderful instance of
decisiveness in a New York Times obituary. Burke Marshall, who represented the
Justice Department in most of the Civil Rights crises in the 1960’s, died in
May. One of his associates, Nicholas Katzenbach, spoke of how decisive
Marshall was. "We were out in a sailboat," he said, "when one of Burke’s socks
fell into the water. Without an instant’s hesitation, he threw the other sock
after it."
I always liked Kay Starr. I think back to the fifties and sixties, even
before television when the radio was my chief contact with the world, and I
remember songs like The Tennessee Waltz, and Put Another Nickel In,
In the Nickelodeon, All I Want is Lovin’You And Music, Music, Music. So it
was a pleasure one day this spring as I was driving down Bob Hope Drive with
my car radio tuned to the Golden Oldies station, suddenly to have that
familiar voice singing to me. The timbre and rhythm were familiar, but the
song was unfamiliar: Talk to the man upstairs; He wants to hear from you!"
I wish I could remember all the words, but you get the idea. Anybody who
drives across the country, as my son and I will do this week, and tunes in to
the local stations gets a lot of country gospel sort of music, and that God is
like the man upstairs: very personal, all-powerful, accessible, and chummy.
"He wants to hear from you!" And no one can deny that such a God is a dynamic
force in the lives of millions of Americans.
The Word is a very powerful symbol, arousing many different kinds of
emotion. A while ago I received an e-mail from someone I don’t know who had
done some work for me. The message was apparently sent to a number of people,
"Since all the polls show that 86% of all Americans believe in God, why all
this fuss about ‘under God’ in our Pledge of Allegiance? Why don’t we just
tell the 14% to sit down and shut up? If you agree, send this on to others. If
you disagree, delete it." I could not comply with either instruction, so I
typed a short response to all the recipients of the original message, "We got
along fine for about 150 years without God in the Pledge of Allegiance. As for
why we don’t tell the other 14% just to sit down and shut up, maybe it has
something to do with ‘liberty and justice for all."
A year ago the President of our denomination, Bill Sinkford, gave a sermon
in Fort Worth, Texas, in which he proposed that we look at the language of our
Unitarian Universalist Association statement of Purposes and Principles and
see whether we ought to bring it up to date by making it more religious. He
was interviewed by a local reporter, who wrote that our President was going to
put God back into our Purposes and Principles. That was picked up by the wire
services, and he soon had a media crisis on his hands. He issued statements
showing how he had been misquoted, denying that he would ever have thought of
doing something so high-handed, and found himself responding to a great many
more Unitarian Universalists. I was getting e-mails from our District office
with subjects like: "More about Bill and God."
When all the fuss had died down, Bill tried to restate his original point:
that our statement is a good organizational piece for running the Association
in a democratic way, but that it leaves one pretty cold in terms of religious
inspiration. He quotes my friend, David Bumbaugh, in saying that we are cut
off from real dialogue with most other religious groups because we have little
or no truly religious language, or "language of reverence." They both affirm
that this "does not have to mean God-talk."
Let me review briefly what the Statement of Purposes and Principles is, and
where it came from. When the American Unitarian Association and the
Universalist Church of America set up a Joint Merger Commission in the 1950’s
to hammer out a plan to bring the two small denominations together under one
roof, part of their proposal was a constitution and by-laws for the new
denomination. There was a large meeting in Syracuse, New York, in 1959, and
both denominations met separately and then together to approve the final
product. The Purposes and Principles statement was analogous to the Preamble
to the United States Constitution. And it was the part that evoked the
greatest controversy. Interestingly, the greatest conflict was whether Jesus
should be mentioned in the statement. They finally settled on wording like "in
the tradition of great leaders of all faiths." There was not a mention of God,
I believe.
About twenty years later, I was on the Board when a new commission was set
up to propose a revision of the statement. They worked for a couple of years
and were especially attentive to two criticisms of the original statement: the
sexist language and the failure to recognize the equal role of women in our
religion; and the lack of attention to concern for protecting the environment.
I think it is perfectly reasonable for Bill Sinkford to suggest that it is
probably time for the statement to be looked over again, and I think he may
realize that this will be opening a can of worms that we will fight and argue
about for a couple of years. And if I were to guess, I might hazard that the
biggest issue will be over "spirituality," and whether our statement is
"spiritual enough." And that means talking about religious language.
Clearly, for some UU’s spirituality means talking about God and for some it
doesn’t. And for many people of all religious persuasions, religion itself is
defined as worshiping a God or gods. How do we reconcile such a great and
fundamental difference among ourselves? Let me start with a personal
statement: I do not believe in what most people define as God, and I am
unwilling to give up the word. I still love Kay Starr, but I think "the man
upstairs" moved out a long time ago.
I think of the experience of Paul Tillich, the great German theologian who
came to the United States and taught at Union, then Harvard and Chicago until
his death. Tillich was a chaplain in the German Army in the First World War.
He wrote later of one horrible night when he had men dying all around him, men
who were his friends and comrades, and part of his job was to bury them. For
Tillich, the nice God who would make everything right for everybody died in
that War. But then he faced the question of whether that meant that he could
not use the word any more; was the whole concept down the drain? He saw a
fundamental split between the world of the scientist and that of the religious
preacher. He came to feel that the religion he had grown up with was
continuing to give the answers to questions that no one was asking. How could
religion keep talking about an all-powerful personal being when it had no
evidence persuasive to a scientist that such a being existed? He thought that
when scientists pointed this out to the religious faithful they were actually
doing them a favor.
But that was not the end of the story. Tillich accepted the idea of God as
a symbol of the whole mystery of our existence, and he defined God as "Being
Itself." That very neatly avoids the question of whether God exists. Tillich
recognized that religion needed such a symbol, but he did not want it confused
with such primitive ideas as "the man upstairs," or the person who is watching
over us and making things happen to us. He had no room for that Old Man in the
Sky. At the same time, he found the bare materialism of science pretty empty,
not a sufficient basis for anyone to base one’s life on. So he continued to
pray in public worship to God, to talk about God, and to write about God. But
this God was clearly a symbol, and there was a great deal of room for anyone
to decide just what this symbol does stand for. For Tillich it became related
to everything in life that could be said to have "depth." Tillich thought that
religion is not a separate category of life the way it is in TIME
magazine—National, International, Finance, Theater, Music, Books, and
Religion—but religion is the dimension of depth in every bit of art, and
music, and culture, and politics, and economics, and all of life itself. So
that is where Paul Tillich found God.
It seems to me that you and I are left with several questions out of all
this discussion: Do we want to use the highly charged and powerful word God in
our own spiritual life? And is the language that we are used to employing
inadequate in describing life and reality as we experience them? Does it help
you in those moments when you struggle to know better who you are to talk to a
God? Does it help you when you ponder what you should do and how you can cope
with all you have to deal with to feel that you are talking to God? If such a
dialogue has become a part of your life, I say nourish it, continue it, expand
it. But if you are not in the habit of thinking in that way, if such a
dialogue is something you left behind, along with "Now I lay me down to
sleep," then continue to describe your inner and outer life in whatever way is
credible and reassuring to you. Words like ‘reality,’ and ‘love,’ and
‘gratitude’ work very well for me; I think they are religious. And if the job
of religion is to describe reality, and to respond to it (and I think it is)
then choose words that fit: beauty, pain, vitality, weariness, atrocity,
hunger, sorrow, joy, blessing, strength, courage, forgiveness, love, and
gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. For the God that is the mystery of all
existence what is our best response? I say gratitude. For a world of
incredible beauty and a day like today? Gratitude. For the things we tried to
do and failed? Gratitude for the chance to try. For the awareness of injustice
and suffering in the world? Gratitude that we recognize it, know what it is
and have some chance to do something about it. For the people we have loved
and lost? Gratitude for what they have meant to us. For all the pain and agony
we have endured and survived? Gratitude for the strength and courage that
finally got us through.
As John Haynes Holmes told us, the poets are often better than the
theologians in summing it all up, and one of my favorite examples is Violet
Turner, longtime member of Cedar Lane, who published her first book of poems
at the age of eighty-five.
OLD WOMAN’S SONG
I may be old, unlovely to the eye
Of one who looks for pointed breast, Smooth cheek, inviting thigh,
But what of that?
My mouth was honey and my taste was sweet
To more than one when I was young
And love my heart’s own beat.
And what of that?
I’ve lived my life and loved it. What I had
Was worth each bit of what I paid.
And should I now be sad
Because of that?
I’ll not cry because no bright tomorrows,
Repeat my yesterdays. I’ve found
Old joys appease new sorrows.
And that is that!
---
Violet Turner
Old joys appease new sorrows—and that is that! I call that gratitude, and I
think it is religious.
Office@CedarLane.org
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