A Deity Worthy of Worship
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 25, 2002
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction: “Snow Geese on NPR”]
When I was a teenager, growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, often times on Sunday mornings I would wake up before anyone else in my house, quickly dress, take my bicycle out of the garage and bike to a little place near my home that I knew: a sort of marshy place, where Coal Creek flowed into Lake Washington; and I would sit there on this big rock, and listen to the water, and think. And there was a kingfisher who nested near there, and also a muskrat; and I would watch these creatures hunt for their breakfasts, sitting quietly as so not to disturb them, and just basking and marveling in the profound sense of solidarity I felt with them: the organic Unity of Carbon-based consciousness, matter and energy wedded together in that all-too-brief creative opportunity we call Life.
After a time, I would get back on my bicycle and head off in the direction of the home of a certain girl I knew, who lived about four miles from me, on a hill overlooking the lake. And about half-way between her house and mine was the Eastshore Unitarian Church; and I discovered that if I timed my morning ride just right, I would arrive at the church just about the time the first service was letting out, so I could sneak in, mingle with the crowd of people coming and going, and browse through the bookstore sort of anonymously before continuing on to Suzanne's.
I never really had enough money then to buy any of the books I wanted (and have probably been making up for that ever since) but I do recall one morning finding a Bobbs-Merrill paperback edition of William Ellery Channing's collected sermons on the discount table for a buck seventy-five. I left church that morning with that book in hand and 25 cents change; and while my budding romance with Suzanne never really got off the ground, I still have the book, and that book literally changed my life.
There was something about Channing's "Unitarian Christianity," and particularly his doctrine of "The Likeness to God" that appealed to both my evolving, adolescent pantheism and my initial, unsophisticated reading of the New Testament: I was one of God's children, created in God's image, here on earth to do God's work with my own hands, to help usher in God's Kingdom by becoming a faithful subject in it. Channing helped me discover how to express my own growing religious sentiments in traditional Christian language (there was even a time when I could proof-text many of them when pushed to the wall).
And of course, after three years at the Harvard Divinity School (something I probably never would have done if it hadn’t been for Channing), I could even call my doctrines by their proper names. I know now, for example, that I have a Socinian Christology and a Pelagian doctrine of Sin; that I am Nominalist in Metaphysics and that my Soteriology follows Peter Abelard's doctrine of the Exemplary Atonement; that my Exegetical Hermeneutic is classically humanist, and my operative Epistemology intuitive, experiential, and essentially mystical.
In plain English, this means that I believe that the Bible is an old book, not so different from other old books, and that it contains both a great deal of religious insight and no small measure of superstitious foolishness as well; that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, not so different from you or I, who recognized that he was a “Child of God” when the Spirit of Divinity descended upon him and moved within him, driving him out into the wilderness to reflect in solitude upon his ultimate commitments. I believe that this same inheritance is available to us all if only we wish to claim it, that we are all potentially children of the deity, and that our sin resides in our "turning away" from our responsibilities as such: disobedience to that law which is written upon our hearts, and which calls us to revere the creative power which gives us life, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I believe that it is Jesus of Nazareth's example of faithfulness -- of being “filled with faith” or “trust,” both in life and upon the cross, which can, if we let it, inspire us also to change our ways; and that the resurrection is merely a metaphor for this same sense of faithfulness exemplified by Jesus, a faith which is "born again" within our souls through imitation; and that the risen “Body of Christ” is that "body of the faithful" who follow "the Way" -- the Church with its "many members."
And while I’m on the subject, I believe as well that "God the Father" and the “Holy Spirit” are likewise metaphors: attempts to describe our feelings about our relationship to a reality too transcendent in its essence to be fully understood by mere men and women, but whose real presence can be sensed by those who seek it, who are sensitive to it, just like we feel a breath of wind upon our faces. It is something we experience in our lives through our own powers of creativity and of righteousness, and our commitment to justice and compassion, the feeling of harmony and solidarity between ourselves and all the Universe, the experience of life itself, attuned to a sense of the eternal. This is the real meaning of “eternal life” -- it is a life well-grounded in a sense of the eternal.
There is nothing particularly unique about these doctrines: they are all well-attested within the Christian tradition. They are all considered heretical of course, but this in itself is no great matter either: considering the state of Christendom today, there is very little practiced under the guise of Christianity that one sect or another does not consider heretical. It’s just that like most Unitarian Universalists, I happen to be a little more consistently heretical than most.
But despite my excellent credentials as a Christian heretic (I am even a member of the Board of Directors of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship), I don't often care to present myself publicly as a Christian these days. My reasons are selfish: I don't want to be mistaken for a Fundamentalist. The Fundamentalists I meet, or see on TV, seem to me to worship a very different Deity than the one I know and love. Their God strikes me as a mean little God, a God who gives folks incurable diseases in order to punish them for their supposed sins, who will reward some his followers with good health and great wealth while striking down the children of others in order to test the faith of their parents; who provides convenient parking spaces in return for mindless prayers of praise while refusing to hear the heartfelt prayers of faithful Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, probably Roman Catholics, and certainly Unitarian Universalists.
He is a God who encourages our government leaders to declare a “crusade” against those whose beliefs are different from our own, who seems to care little about the delicate world ecosystem it is claimed he created in only six days, who meddles shamelessly in people's lives for no other purpose than his own amusement and glorification, who puts little stock in our honest affection for those around us, demanding only that we approach Him respectfully on our knees. Such a God as this, even if he existed, would not be worthy of our worship; and it bothers me to think that my Deity might be confused by some with him, particularly since from a distance they tend to look a little alike.
But the God I worship is not a bit mean-spirited; in fact, she tends to be forgiving to a fault. She cares deeply for all she has created, but respects our integrity and human freedom; she wants us to make the most of our various gifts, but not at the expense of those around us. And she doesn't really have a gender; I just find it convenient to think of her in the feminine in order to distinguish her in my thoughts from that other guy. She doesn't mind; she's revealed herself to human beings under a thousand different names and faces. She delights in the diversity of the Universe she has created, and her greatest joy is to watch her children grow and learn, sharing in her Creation through our own creative inspiration.
There is another reason I don't often characterize myself as a Christian these days, and this involves my profound appreciation for the other religious faiths of the world. In standard philosophical terms, the Christian tradition may well be sufficient for salvation, but it is not necessarily necessary; God's home has many mansions, and there are likewise many doors through which one may enter. This is not to discount the importance of being grounded in a particular religious tradition or community; while there may well be many paths to the mountaintop, once you have chosen the path you will follow the way indeed is straight and narrow. But there is nothing in the rules which says you can't appreciate the view from the other paths as you struggle along your own.
My own path, call it what you may, is the path embodied historically by the Unitarian and Universalist traditions. Perhaps it meanders a bit more than most, but I'm not in any particular hurry: the mountain isn't going anywhere, I'll get to the top eventually. I can appreciate the fact that there are many who grow frustrated blazing their own trails, who get tired of the frequent switchbacks, the unbridged rivers, the constantly changing grade and occasional need to backtrack; who reminisce fondly, perhaps, about the well-beaten trails of their childhood, or the kindly guide who held their hand each step of the way, and told them what they were supposed to be seeing as they passed each lookout point. And I'm sure there are many still on those paths, who perhaps have never been off the beaten track themselves, who wonder how we find our way to the top at all. The answer is obvious; you don't have to be Daniel Boone to figure it out. Head up. Always up. The way to the mountaintop requires traveling uphill.
For my own part, I've never been able to understand those who seem to promise: "Say this, believe that, and you'll coast right into heaven." Maybe they know something that I don't; maybe they've got a helicopter stashed away down there or something. For my own part, I don't want to get to the top of the mountain by helicopter; I want to climb there under my own power, so that by the time I arrive I know every bush and shrub and rock, and can truly appreciate the view out over the valley. You see, there's more to climbing a mountain than merely planting a flag at the summit and eating your lunch. And the God I worship appreciates this fact; that's why she made the whole mountain in the first place.
It's ironic, I suppose, but I seldom feel more sympathetic towards Christianity than when I am asserting the integrity and the autonomy of my own Unitarian Universalist faith. And I sometimes wonder how the early Christians must have felt, when they too came to the profound realization that their faith was no longer just another Jewish sect, but something which had value in and of itself, a new religion, with its own message to the world. They were few in number, still not certain precisely what it was they had experienced in their lives: a new vision of God, a relationship as intimate as that of a child with its father, and an example, in Jesus, of the strength which that relationship could bring to one's religious spirit, the courage to face martyrdom, even on a Roman cross, and still remain full of faith. They may have felt much as Moses must have felt, returning from his mountaintop at Sinai only to discover that his own brother was worshiping a Golden Calf. Idolatry is a progressive sin. Our idols grow more sophisticated as our species grows in understanding; and it falls to fresh generations to send each new idol crashing in its turn.
Some 600 years before the birth of Jesus, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes noted that: "[We] mortals believe that the gods are begotten, and that they wear clothing like our own, and have a voice and body...The Ethiopians make their gods snub nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs gray eyed and red haired.... And if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could draw with their hands and do what men can do, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own....[But the] One god, greatest among gods and human beings, [is] in no way similar to mortals either in body or mind.... He sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over...He remains always in the same place, without moving; nor is it fitting that he should come and go, first to one place and then to another....But without toil he sets all things in motion by the thought of his mind."
And I am often reminded of the wisdom of Xenophanes whenever I see that familiar portrait of a blonde haired, blue eyed plastic Jesus gazing out at me from the front of a Bible, or the face of a clock. The kind of God we chose to worship tells us far more about ourselves than it does about the deity. For the one true God will fill whatever space we create for her in our minds and in our lives, and still it will not be enough. But perhaps it will be sufficient, for the time being at least, to lead us closer to our room in her mansion on the mountaintop.
***
READING: “Likeness to God” by William Ellery Channing (1828)
Consider...for a moment, how we obtain our ideas of God. Whence come the conceptions which we include under that august name? Whence do we derive our knowledge of the attributes and perfections which constitute the Supreme Being? I answer, we derive them from our own souls. The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our creator. The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity. God, then, does not sustain a figurative resemblance to [hu]man[ity]. It is the resemblance of a parent to a child, the likeness of a kindred nature.
We call God a Mind. He has revealed himself as a Spirit. But what do we know of mind, but through the unfolding of this principle in our own breasts? That unbounded spiritual energy which we call God, is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves.-- We ascribe thought or intelligence to the Deity, as one of his most glorious attributes. And what means this language? These terms we have framed to express operations or faculties of our own souls. The Infinite Light would be for ever hidden from us, did not kindred rays dawn and brighten within us. God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 25, 2002
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction: “Snow Geese on NPR”]
When I was a teenager, growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, often times on Sunday mornings I would wake up before anyone else in my house, quickly dress, take my bicycle out of the garage and bike to a little place near my home that I knew: a sort of marshy place, where Coal Creek flowed into Lake Washington; and I would sit there on this big rock, and listen to the water, and think. And there was a kingfisher who nested near there, and also a muskrat; and I would watch these creatures hunt for their breakfasts, sitting quietly as so not to disturb them, and just basking and marveling in the profound sense of solidarity I felt with them: the organic Unity of Carbon-based consciousness, matter and energy wedded together in that all-too-brief creative opportunity we call Life.
After a time, I would get back on my bicycle and head off in the direction of the home of a certain girl I knew, who lived about four miles from me, on a hill overlooking the lake. And about half-way between her house and mine was the Eastshore Unitarian Church; and I discovered that if I timed my morning ride just right, I would arrive at the church just about the time the first service was letting out, so I could sneak in, mingle with the crowd of people coming and going, and browse through the bookstore sort of anonymously before continuing on to Suzanne's.
I never really had enough money then to buy any of the books I wanted (and have probably been making up for that ever since) but I do recall one morning finding a Bobbs-Merrill paperback edition of William Ellery Channing's collected sermons on the discount table for a buck seventy-five. I left church that morning with that book in hand and 25 cents change; and while my budding romance with Suzanne never really got off the ground, I still have the book, and that book literally changed my life.
There was something about Channing's "Unitarian Christianity," and particularly his doctrine of "The Likeness to God" that appealed to both my evolving, adolescent pantheism and my initial, unsophisticated reading of the New Testament: I was one of God's children, created in God's image, here on earth to do God's work with my own hands, to help usher in God's Kingdom by becoming a faithful subject in it. Channing helped me discover how to express my own growing religious sentiments in traditional Christian language (there was even a time when I could proof-text many of them when pushed to the wall).
And of course, after three years at the Harvard Divinity School (something I probably never would have done if it hadn’t been for Channing), I could even call my doctrines by their proper names. I know now, for example, that I have a Socinian Christology and a Pelagian doctrine of Sin; that I am Nominalist in Metaphysics and that my Soteriology follows Peter Abelard's doctrine of the Exemplary Atonement; that my Exegetical Hermeneutic is classically humanist, and my operative Epistemology intuitive, experiential, and essentially mystical.
In plain English, this means that I believe that the Bible is an old book, not so different from other old books, and that it contains both a great deal of religious insight and no small measure of superstitious foolishness as well; that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, not so different from you or I, who recognized that he was a “Child of God” when the Spirit of Divinity descended upon him and moved within him, driving him out into the wilderness to reflect in solitude upon his ultimate commitments. I believe that this same inheritance is available to us all if only we wish to claim it, that we are all potentially children of the deity, and that our sin resides in our "turning away" from our responsibilities as such: disobedience to that law which is written upon our hearts, and which calls us to revere the creative power which gives us life, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I believe that it is Jesus of Nazareth's example of faithfulness -- of being “filled with faith” or “trust,” both in life and upon the cross, which can, if we let it, inspire us also to change our ways; and that the resurrection is merely a metaphor for this same sense of faithfulness exemplified by Jesus, a faith which is "born again" within our souls through imitation; and that the risen “Body of Christ” is that "body of the faithful" who follow "the Way" -- the Church with its "many members."
And while I’m on the subject, I believe as well that "God the Father" and the “Holy Spirit” are likewise metaphors: attempts to describe our feelings about our relationship to a reality too transcendent in its essence to be fully understood by mere men and women, but whose real presence can be sensed by those who seek it, who are sensitive to it, just like we feel a breath of wind upon our faces. It is something we experience in our lives through our own powers of creativity and of righteousness, and our commitment to justice and compassion, the feeling of harmony and solidarity between ourselves and all the Universe, the experience of life itself, attuned to a sense of the eternal. This is the real meaning of “eternal life” -- it is a life well-grounded in a sense of the eternal.
There is nothing particularly unique about these doctrines: they are all well-attested within the Christian tradition. They are all considered heretical of course, but this in itself is no great matter either: considering the state of Christendom today, there is very little practiced under the guise of Christianity that one sect or another does not consider heretical. It’s just that like most Unitarian Universalists, I happen to be a little more consistently heretical than most.
But despite my excellent credentials as a Christian heretic (I am even a member of the Board of Directors of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship), I don't often care to present myself publicly as a Christian these days. My reasons are selfish: I don't want to be mistaken for a Fundamentalist. The Fundamentalists I meet, or see on TV, seem to me to worship a very different Deity than the one I know and love. Their God strikes me as a mean little God, a God who gives folks incurable diseases in order to punish them for their supposed sins, who will reward some his followers with good health and great wealth while striking down the children of others in order to test the faith of their parents; who provides convenient parking spaces in return for mindless prayers of praise while refusing to hear the heartfelt prayers of faithful Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, probably Roman Catholics, and certainly Unitarian Universalists.
He is a God who encourages our government leaders to declare a “crusade” against those whose beliefs are different from our own, who seems to care little about the delicate world ecosystem it is claimed he created in only six days, who meddles shamelessly in people's lives for no other purpose than his own amusement and glorification, who puts little stock in our honest affection for those around us, demanding only that we approach Him respectfully on our knees. Such a God as this, even if he existed, would not be worthy of our worship; and it bothers me to think that my Deity might be confused by some with him, particularly since from a distance they tend to look a little alike.
But the God I worship is not a bit mean-spirited; in fact, she tends to be forgiving to a fault. She cares deeply for all she has created, but respects our integrity and human freedom; she wants us to make the most of our various gifts, but not at the expense of those around us. And she doesn't really have a gender; I just find it convenient to think of her in the feminine in order to distinguish her in my thoughts from that other guy. She doesn't mind; she's revealed herself to human beings under a thousand different names and faces. She delights in the diversity of the Universe she has created, and her greatest joy is to watch her children grow and learn, sharing in her Creation through our own creative inspiration.
There is another reason I don't often characterize myself as a Christian these days, and this involves my profound appreciation for the other religious faiths of the world. In standard philosophical terms, the Christian tradition may well be sufficient for salvation, but it is not necessarily necessary; God's home has many mansions, and there are likewise many doors through which one may enter. This is not to discount the importance of being grounded in a particular religious tradition or community; while there may well be many paths to the mountaintop, once you have chosen the path you will follow the way indeed is straight and narrow. But there is nothing in the rules which says you can't appreciate the view from the other paths as you struggle along your own.
My own path, call it what you may, is the path embodied historically by the Unitarian and Universalist traditions. Perhaps it meanders a bit more than most, but I'm not in any particular hurry: the mountain isn't going anywhere, I'll get to the top eventually. I can appreciate the fact that there are many who grow frustrated blazing their own trails, who get tired of the frequent switchbacks, the unbridged rivers, the constantly changing grade and occasional need to backtrack; who reminisce fondly, perhaps, about the well-beaten trails of their childhood, or the kindly guide who held their hand each step of the way, and told them what they were supposed to be seeing as they passed each lookout point. And I'm sure there are many still on those paths, who perhaps have never been off the beaten track themselves, who wonder how we find our way to the top at all. The answer is obvious; you don't have to be Daniel Boone to figure it out. Head up. Always up. The way to the mountaintop requires traveling uphill.
For my own part, I've never been able to understand those who seem to promise: "Say this, believe that, and you'll coast right into heaven." Maybe they know something that I don't; maybe they've got a helicopter stashed away down there or something. For my own part, I don't want to get to the top of the mountain by helicopter; I want to climb there under my own power, so that by the time I arrive I know every bush and shrub and rock, and can truly appreciate the view out over the valley. You see, there's more to climbing a mountain than merely planting a flag at the summit and eating your lunch. And the God I worship appreciates this fact; that's why she made the whole mountain in the first place.
It's ironic, I suppose, but I seldom feel more sympathetic towards Christianity than when I am asserting the integrity and the autonomy of my own Unitarian Universalist faith. And I sometimes wonder how the early Christians must have felt, when they too came to the profound realization that their faith was no longer just another Jewish sect, but something which had value in and of itself, a new religion, with its own message to the world. They were few in number, still not certain precisely what it was they had experienced in their lives: a new vision of God, a relationship as intimate as that of a child with its father, and an example, in Jesus, of the strength which that relationship could bring to one's religious spirit, the courage to face martyrdom, even on a Roman cross, and still remain full of faith. They may have felt much as Moses must have felt, returning from his mountaintop at Sinai only to discover that his own brother was worshiping a Golden Calf. Idolatry is a progressive sin. Our idols grow more sophisticated as our species grows in understanding; and it falls to fresh generations to send each new idol crashing in its turn.
Some 600 years before the birth of Jesus, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes noted that: "[We] mortals believe that the gods are begotten, and that they wear clothing like our own, and have a voice and body...The Ethiopians make their gods snub nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs gray eyed and red haired.... And if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could draw with their hands and do what men can do, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own....[But the] One god, greatest among gods and human beings, [is] in no way similar to mortals either in body or mind.... He sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over...He remains always in the same place, without moving; nor is it fitting that he should come and go, first to one place and then to another....But without toil he sets all things in motion by the thought of his mind."
And I am often reminded of the wisdom of Xenophanes whenever I see that familiar portrait of a blonde haired, blue eyed plastic Jesus gazing out at me from the front of a Bible, or the face of a clock. The kind of God we chose to worship tells us far more about ourselves than it does about the deity. For the one true God will fill whatever space we create for her in our minds and in our lives, and still it will not be enough. But perhaps it will be sufficient, for the time being at least, to lead us closer to our room in her mansion on the mountaintop.
***
READING: “Likeness to God” by William Ellery Channing (1828)
Consider...for a moment, how we obtain our ideas of God. Whence come the conceptions which we include under that august name? Whence do we derive our knowledge of the attributes and perfections which constitute the Supreme Being? I answer, we derive them from our own souls. The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our creator. The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity. God, then, does not sustain a figurative resemblance to [hu]man[ity]. It is the resemblance of a parent to a child, the likeness of a kindred nature.
We call God a Mind. He has revealed himself as a Spirit. But what do we know of mind, but through the unfolding of this principle in our own breasts? That unbounded spiritual energy which we call God, is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves.-- We ascribe thought or intelligence to the Deity, as one of his most glorious attributes. And what means this language? These terms we have framed to express operations or faculties of our own souls. The Infinite Light would be for ever hidden from us, did not kindred rays dawn and brighten within us. God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 11:31 AM
