Reading:Reading: “God, or the Ground of Our Being” (p. 125)
from Forward Through the Ages,
a collection of sermons and sermon excerpts of
The Reverend Dr. Dana McLean Greeley (July 13, 1983)

         I cannot think of God as a person. But I can think of God as energy and light and love, both in me and around me, and five thousand billion miles away. The universe is too wonderful not to have a cohesive and purposeful power behind it. It cannot be an accident. It must be a uni-verse. God is the term that I use to describe the naturalness and the miraculousness of the power and the wonder of all life.

         As the universe unfolds its mystery and immensity and magnificence before us, the word “God” becomes more meaningful rather than less. I think the universe is not neutral, and values are not illusory, and life is not empty. A cosmos that is alive is the “ground of our being.” But the spiritual reality of that vitality I call God. There is one God and Father, or Mother, of us all, who is above all and in us all. In him, or her, we live and move and have our being.

Sermon

         Have you asked yourself why you come to church, this church in particular? I have no doubt that you come to this church for a variety of reasons. One major reason you come here is because whatever is your theological belief or your deep spiritual response to the world and life itself you can find its expression here. Whether you are philosophically or spiritually oriented, you can certainly find a religious home here. Whether you are a theist, a deist, an atheist, a pantheist, or some other indefinable religionist, you will certainly find a home here. But the most important thing for you is freedom, freedom of religious thought and expression. For most if not all of us here, our spirituality is deeply personal. Because of this, it is not easy for us to share our thoughts on it. And yet, in order for us to move forward spiritually, it is helpful for us to find words that can at least come close to expressing what is in our hearts. This is why I am beginning a series of sermon s on Unitarian Universalist perspectives of the divine (or the sacred or the holy).

         When I go home today, my spouse will say, “My, you used God a lot today.” I understand that he says this when his tolerance for God talk has been exceeded. This may happen to some of you today. So I want to suggest to those of you who have a similar tolerance level, that when I say “God”, you reinterpret it to mean that which is sacred or holy to you or that which has the highest value to you that life can offer, even if that is love itself.

         You might not be like the little Unitarian boy who told his Sunday school teacher that God lives in their bathroom at their house. She was startled and said, “What makes you say that God is in your bathroom?” The little boy said, “My dad stands outside of the bathroom and shouts, “My God, are you still in there?!?”

         One God concept that Unitarian Universalists have the most trouble with is what we call the anthropomorphic God, or the “man-like” God, or the personal God. This is the God from the old Hebrew scripture, the God who sends blessings to those who do good and follow the law and punishes those who do evil and do not observe the law. This is the simple theology of the Jews and the Muslims and fundamentalist Christians. Their God is the God who acts in history and who answers your prayers.

         What is clear to many of us is that the good folks are not necessarily rewarded nor are the evil doers punished. Often it is entirely the opposite. What is also clear to us is that prayers are not necessarily answered. It can be grating to most of us when we hear people say that their friend recovered from cancer because their church prayed for him or her. Or their son did not die in battle because they prayed for him. What can be said when a church prays for someone who then dies of cancer and what about the soldier who is killed and whose parents prayed night and day.

         When the Tsunami struck recently, we heard of the suffering people themselves saying that God is punishing them. If the world really believed that was so, we would not have sent aid. If it is God’s will to wipe out 150,000 poverty stricken people, who are we to swoop in and help save the rest. If God did cause them to die then God is not good. If God does not stop the abuse, injury, or death of innocent people, especially children, across this world, then what explanation can there possibly be? The God who is a Super Person or Super Creator who makes things happen in the world or chooses to ignore bad things just is not believable to people of reason. If God is to be a concept we can believe in, it must make sense to us.

         Rabbi Harold Kushner used to be an orthodox Rabbi. He followed all the laws and did everything that was good. His life and religious beliefs were turned upside down when his second son was born with progeria, a disease that ages the human body 10 years for every year of life. His 7-year old son had all the characteristics of a 70-year old man and the Rabbi watched his little son die of old age at the age of 8 years. After much reflection, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that our world is a world of random circumstances. In the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, he wrote of his journey to the conclusion that the world is a random world.

         Liberal religionists had been moving away from the idea of a God who acts in history for almost two hundred years. But they were averse to naming what they did believe. Long before the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961 they had each come to the conclusion that if God is, then God is Love. Now what might God as love look or feel like?

         What most people meant by this is that when we behave lovingly, when we help our neighbor—which we call social justice, when we have compassion and follow that sentiment with help of some kind, this is love in action, and some may think this is God in action, God in us in action. We have long believed that salvation is by character and that the Holy Spirit is the activity of the divine in humankind. Our Seventh Principle, the interdependent web, allowed us to express our connection not only to the people of the world but also animals and the environment. The first source from which we draw our inspiration is “Direct experience of that transcendent mystery and wonder…and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” When Unitarian Universalists created their Principles and Sources from which they draw their inspiration, they perceived a far wider possibility of connection to the world and beyond. A popular theology amongst us is process theology, which expresses a c reative and divine process at work in all creation; the expression of God in this is that of the pan-en-theistic God. “Pan” means “all”, “en” means “in”, and “theistic” is God, or “God is in all and all is in God.”

         The title of the sermon asks whether God is personal, impersonal, or none of the above? I say that God is none of these. We have said that the personal God that acts in history and answers prayers has not made much sense to religious liberals. The panentheistic God is the divine force that contains all things, that is in all things, and is yet also beyond. We call this God both imminent, which is near, and transcendent, which is far. And we mean by imminent that God is in us and it is up to us to do the work of the co-creator, and so it was up to us to help the victims of the Tsunami who suffered in a random world.

         You have perhaps heard the revived controversy of evolutionism and creationism. Scientists on the creationism side have invented the term Intelligent Design. These scientists say that the universe is so complex that there has to be an intelligent design; it couldn’t just happen, such as in the Big Bang Theory. They say that the human eye alone is extremely complex and could not just evolve. Other scientists disagree and say the universe, including the human eye, could have evolved and we just can’t answer all the questions right now. (TIME, 01/31/05) This argument will go on for a long time. Evolution does not necessarily deny the existence of an Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design need not deny that there was a Big Bang and that the world evolved. These two sides need to find common ground.

         Mystics in all religions have one thing in common, their perspective of God is that of the panentheistic God, the transcendent and imminent, the near and the far, the force that is in all things and that transcends all things. If God is in us, part of us, then when we are quiet, we can connect with that god-self. If God is in all things, then all things must have a way of communicating amongst themselves, including all of nature; we should be able to connect with all things, animate and inanimate. What if we can indeed connect together? What implication might this have for the concept of prayer? What implication does it have for when in our distress we cry out for help? But this is another sermon.

         On the front of your Order of Service are quotes from ancient and modern mystics. Let us have a look. At the top, we read by Pablo Casals, “In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness….I see what people call God in all these things.” And from two thirteenth century mystics, Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen we see the clearly panentheistic God. They were always in trouble with their church authorities. And you can see the quotes from the Gospels of a panentheistic view of God; we see glimpses of such a divinity throughout the Bible and the scripture of all other major religions. I hope you will keep this Order of Service for reference, particularly for the definition of panentheism—the divine is in all things and unifies all things but is ultimately greater than all things. (For those of you who are nit-pickers, you might be wondering what the difference is between pantheism and panentheism. It is simply that pantheism holds that God is only t he sum total of the observable universe.)

         In all of our musings here, we do not mean to diminish the idea that those who have the perspective that God is a personal God who acts in history and answers prayers and rewards and punishes. We just say that there are those of us to whom the panentheistic God is more believable and reasonable. We must always allow that the beliefs of others are valid for them; for this is what acceptance of one another (our third principle) is all about.

         When humankind is comfortable in the world and fear is weaker than creativity, then the comfortable ones feel they can enter into the process of things, into the creativity to create a world that is more just. This is all part of the awakening as to why we are here, awakening to the task of helping one another. One spiritual teacher says, “While religion is noisy and on public display, personal spirituality is silent and hidden from view but extraordinarily potent….a strong deep foundation may be found just under the surface that will help to stabilize and inspire those on the fast track of awakening. There is nothing safer and more secure than the presence and awareness of Spirit itself within the human heart.” (Stevens, Jose) This is the Spirit we encounter within, in our quiet moments, and also in our communal moments of awareness, such as this one. So let us celebrate this moment of Spirit awareness.

References

Fox, Matthew. Original Blessing, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Lemonick, Michael D. “Stealth Attack on Evolution,” from TIME, January 31, 2005.

“Biblical Panentheism: The Everywhere-ness; of God—God in all things” www.frimmin.com/faith/godinall.html

Article from the journal The Power Path, December 2004, Vol. 18:12 by Jose and Lena Stevens.