As I said earlier, today’s message began with a question from Dave Black, winner of this year’s auctioned sermon topic: What about God for UUs? Put another way: What ideas might help Unitarian Universalists reconcile the relevance of God to our non-creedal tradition of free faith?
I always take the auction sermon winner out to lunch to talk through their ideas. Over lunch at Sahara, Dave and I had a great conversation about this thing humans call “God.” The idea of a creator — a “first effect” — seems built into us. Even for those who don’t pray, David mused, what is this prayer-like mode we sometimes find ourselves in? Functionally, the idea of God gives humanity something to look toward when we gaze with wonder and awe at the universe. What came before us? What is the “wow” of a beautiful sunset? And what about Love — something that seems unique to mammals? Is it entirely an evolutionary adaptation, or is something larger than ourselves pulling us toward connection beyond what is necessary for survival.
So this morning we are talking about the name of God and what relevance it holds for our faith tradition — one so rooted in the humanist ideal not of divine beings, but of “being angels for each other,” as Dave put it.
I want to lift up three lenses for viewing God. First, the traditional lens of an eternal and all-powerful God — the immutable, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God. In plain terms: a God who is unchangeable, knows everything, and if you’re really good, lets you into heaven. You probably know where I’m going with that.
Second, there’s the lens of something called process theology, which I’ve found useful in approaching God as a imaginative function of the universe and the source of creativity and wonder. It is only as “all powerful” as we have power ourselves to create and destroy within creation. This God isn’t immutable, but can change as we change. A God as process is vulnerable to Love just as we are, and is “becoming,” “emerging,” and growing alongside us. Some of us call this God by another name, the Call of Love. That is, the only power available to God is the influence of Love. Love makes us more powerful. That which is not Love pushes us toward chaos.
Do things feel a little chaotic these days?
Third, I want to return to transcendentalism — a theology native to our Unitarian tradition — which presents a God that is everywhere in Nature and also fully contained within each of us. The Universe around us is God; the Universe within us is God. Everywhere and fully inside, at the same time. A transcendental God is not owned by any one religion, and can only truly be known through experience — not scripture, not dogma, not a sermon, not a single church. Only through connection and experience.
The first God — eternal and all-powerful — has caused us a great deal of trouble. This God can seem capricious and mean. Perhaps this is the lens through which you first encountered the idea of God, or the one that gave you an aversion to the very word. It’s certainly the God I was raised with, where people who believed a certain way were rewarded with Love and healing, and everyone else was living in sin and delusion. I remember a Belgian film called The Brand New Testament where God was depicted as a mean old man, unshaven, wandering around in a dirty bathrobe. He’d make the phone ring just as you got in the bathtub, or make the other line at Costco move faster than yours. Toast always lands buttered-side down, and God amuses himself with a computer game that causes real-world disasters. (Spoiler: his goddess wife and daughter eventually get things in check. Were it so easy.)
Not many of us here have use for that kind of God, so let’s just eliminate that right now. I’m not talking this morning about a white bearded dude who lives in the sky. Or in Belgium. Or anywhere. I’m just not interested. I suspect you aren’t either. It’s not a matter of faith as much as it’s just not who we are.
True confession, this is not the first auction sermon where someone asked me about the relationship between God and our tradition of free faith—which includes both theologies that embrace God, and those that don’t. Some of us are interested, some of us aren’t. Some of us need a relationship with God, others left that relationship in the rear view long ago—and are doing JUST fine. And we’re all good. Good with the universe. Good with each other. Good with ourselves. Good with God, if you will. We will never find one understanding of God that works for every UU. That is not our way. It’s not just a matter of faith, it’s who we are.
The second lens is something called process theology, which is a fancy term for saying that what matters most is how we connect through the invitations of Love all around us. Process theology emerged from the scholarship of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology proposes that God is not all-powerful, and that it grows as we grow, cries as we cry, mourns as we mourn, learns as we learn. It evolves as we evolve. It’s a God without a face that is somehow all faces — one that doesn’t appear to humanity as a consciousness, but that we might glimpse from time to time when we are attuned in a particular way. It’s as if we got new lenses and our perspective shifts. A God that didn’t intelligently design the universe but simply is. Is connection. Is the Big Bang. Is quiet. Is Nature.
A process God is changeable, knows only what is now, evolves with its creation, and is vulnerable to Love.
I’m using it this morning because it’s simple enough to be a beautiful thought experiment and complex enough that you can fall down a rabbit hole with it later on your own time. Even Whitehead’s students couldn’t follow his writing — when he died, they got together and created a guide that everyone who claims to have read Whitehead actually reads instead. But process theology is incredibly useful for dismantling a concept of God so deeply ingrained that we can’t seem to escape it. God isn’t something you are going to understand. It is only something you can encounter.
This brings us to the third lens — how our own tradition wrestled down the notion of God in the 19th century. We don’t use the word transcendentalism much anymore because, I believe, it has simply become who we are.
Transcendentalism, I confess, is not only how I came to understand God personally, it’s how I discovered Unitarian Universalism.
It’s a story worth sharing. I was attending a Christian college — not one Christian in name only, like a Loyola or that Baptist college known as the University of Chicago, but a genuinely parochial school. Every morning, we stopped everything for an hour of Bible study. One bright spring morning in American literature class, we were studying the American Romantic writers, also known as the Transcendentalists. For some time I had been struggling with the Christian faith of my childhood, and had enrolled at that school as a last-ditch effort to be a good Christian. It was not going well.
The teacher called on me to read a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” — some of whose words were captured in our special music this morning. “I become a transparent eyeball,” Emerson wrote, describing the experience of walking through nature as God itself might experience it.
It was my UU conversion experience.
Emerson writes: “In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
Emerson describes an epiphany — entirely separate from church, religion, or scripture — in which he becomes a transparent being through whom the Universe circulates. He sees all; he becomes both a part of God and God itself.
Whaaaat?
God is simply everything. We aren’t separate from it. We can’t be separate if it is us. In that moment between faith and reason, there is nothing capable of judging us or making decisions for us. There is only a Universal Love in which everything is connected.
I blurted to the professor: “Mr. Charles, is there a church that goes along with this stuff?”
There was a hush in the room. Among our flock, one did not ask about other churches.
Mr. Charles smiled knowingly and said, “I think there are probably a few Unitarian churches still around.”
Cindy and I found a Unitarian Universalist church.
Mr. Charles eventually moved on to write book reviews for the Washington Post, and became a Quaker.
What is transcendentalism? It’s a tricky question because the transcendentalists had diverse interests — education, politics, abolition, suffrage, philosophy, and literature. According to historian Dean Grodzins, one theme unifies them: “A transcendentalist is [someone] trying to transform the world. What differs, among different transcendentalists, has to do with the nature of the world that needs changing, and the nature of the change advocated.”
This transformational impulse was at the root of each leading transcendentalist’s life. Ralph Waldo Emerson sought to change the religious establishment, pitting frigid intellectualism against self-reliance and creedalism against experience. Sophia and George Ripley advocated for utopian ideals and created an alternative community called Brook Farm. The brilliant Margaret Fuller pushed against patriarchal structures by creating “conversation” groups to discuss great ideas in an egalitarian framework. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was an ardent abolitionist and advocate for freedom. And Henry David Thoreau went to the woods not to escape, but to connect.
My interest in the transcendentalists is that they provide, in all their diversity, a unifying theology still useful to Unitarian Universalism today. The more I hear that we lack a common theology, the more I want to point people toward the transcendentalists.
Look at the Six Sources of Unitarian Universalism in our hymnal — every single one can be traced to transcendental ideas:
- Direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder
- Respect for knowledge and the prophetic words and deeds of great thinkers who challenged establishment structures with reform and compassion
- Recognition of wisdom outside our Judeo-Christian tradition — especially Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam
- Respect for Judeo-Christian mandates to love
- Guidance from reason and scientific inquiry
- Harmony with nature through direct experience
Each of these threads was a primary motivation for the transcendentalists: direct revelation of divine truth; the power of reason to inform conscience and motivate social change; the wisdom of all traditions; the direct experience of God.
These prophets from 150 years ago sought to change their world through a radical redefinition of divine nature. They rehabilitated God. We may not recognize it as a common theology because it feels like common sense — like the fish who asks, “What’s water?”
So here are the takeaways. First, there is no single answer to how Unitarian Universalists understand, describe, or relate to God. We reject the capricious God in a bathrobe — not as a matter of belief so much as a matter of who we are.
Second, if imagining God as a creative, evolving, changing process of Love in the universe sparks something, great. The notion of God can be as boundless as your imagination. Our faith tradition hands that conversation to you. Seize it. It’s not a matter of belief. It’s just who we are.
And third, we are still, at heart, a gathering of 19th-century transcendentalists — and in that I hope you find both comfort and excitement. It’s amusing to remember that the transcendentalists originally broke away from the Unitarians because the Unitarians of the day were too rigid. Most Unitarian preachers were frightened by transcendentalism’s freedom. Faith without church? God visible in all the world’s religious traditions? God as Nature? Who’s going to come to church when you can just go to the woods?
And then, as brave Unitarian preachers began preaching this good news, it caught on. Churches came alive. They filled. And even though we may not call it by its name, we are still transcendentalists in how we experience the holy and sublime, which many call God — even if you don’t use that name. But you can, if you want. And you don’t have to. It’s not what we believe. It’s just ßwho we are.