Its words, concluding in verse 5: O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, be thou our guard while troubles last, and our eternal home.
This is the way that most western people engaged with their concept of God, until the 20th century, and it could easily be said that most people who practice religions that come from the Middle East still do.
The three largest religions in the Western World are the Abrahamic Trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The practitioners of these three faiths trace their origins to the same man, the father of their peoples, Abraham.
In the Torah, in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, God tells Abraham to take is his son Isaac up to the mountain and sacrifice Isaac, testing Abrahams obedience to Yahweh. Abraham does as he is told; he builds the altar, gathers the wood, ties up his son Isaac, and as Abraham is just about to put his knife to his own child, God tells him to stop. God then delivers a ram to be sacrificed, and because Abraham is so obedient, God tells him that his children will populate the nations of the world.
This has actually come to pass. Jews, Christians and Muslims live in every nation around the globe.
In more orthodox faiths, people may turn to God for help, as in ages past, so too, today. People who have this kind of relationship with their God invoke the help of God, or Jesus, since the either party is generally felt to be a regular, daily presence in their lives.
I hope that people who feel this way will always be comfortable in my presence, that I never say anything to offend their sense of their own faith—just because my own faith is radically different from theirs.
I was once in an interfaith clergy lunch, and around the table were clergy of many flavors. There was a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, an Orthodox Priest, a Lutheran Pastor, an Episcopalian Priest, a Congregationalist minister, and several non-Abrahamic ministers…Buddhists, Sikhs, etc.
I looked around the table, and most of the clergy I knew at least by name, having worked in interfaith things with them over the past couple of years, and I chuckled. When Kathleen, the Episcopal Priest ask me why I was laughing, I said:
Well, as I look around this table I see the journey of my religion. First we were Jews, then we left Judaism. Then after the reformation, along with the Lutherans and Episcopalians, we left the Catholic Church, in the 16th century. Then the Calvinists, represented by our Congregationalist friend, left the Church of England, and then the people in my faith formally left the Congregationalists just about 250 hundred years ago.
Each time we had a theological disagreement, we just packed our bags and started a new church, until that church got too stuck in its ways, then once again, we packed our bags and moved on. I’m just wondering when that will happen to the Unitarian Universalists, and what the new group would be called, and if I would be leaving with them.
Kathleen just shook her head and smiled at me.
Our faith is a liberal faith. This does not mean that we are universally political, but rather that we are a people who are gathered, and part of our religious task and duty is to be self-reflexive, to ask ourselves “What do I believe, and how does it serve me and my life?”
We are not the only liberal faith, by the way, the United Church of Christ is our nearest cousin, as one example, and they, too, spend a good amount of time thinking about their faith.
So while there was a time, not so very long ago, that a hymn like the one we just sang, was included in Singing the Living Tradition, published in June of 1993.
The theology of a God to whom we can turn for protection may seem very old fashioned to many of us, but it’s not too far back in our past.
I have here with me two older hymn books. The Red One and the Blue One. If you want to engage in some real church nerdery, you should read some of the lyrics in these older hymnals, and see just how far we have, and haven’t come, from a more orthodox understanding of a God to whom we can turn in times of trouble. You can actually trace the theological development of Unitarian Universalism in the lyrics of these books.
From our Teal hymnal, the supplement, you can see where we’ve moved since 1993.
I’ve been talking with you for a few minutes about an old, or older understanding of God and faith with an eye on the global.
But now I’d like to talk with you about the specific, the individual.
If you think about God, the concept, the deity, think about the image of God that comes to your mind.
How old were you when you encountered this image of God that you’re carrying with you?
In my travels, often I have found that if people are arguing with God, it’s this very God that you’re imagining right now.
As adults, they are struggling with the concrete idea of God that there were taught as children, when their adult self can only be satisfied with a more nuanced understanding. This is part of human development. As children first we think of all four legged animals as “Dog.” We think of all adults as being parents, because that’s our model. As we grow, though, we come to understand that all four legged animals are not dogs and people live a variety of lives, not all of them including children.
Part of what allowed me to become a minister of this faith is that I’m not only allowed to wrestle with this image of God, I’m encouraged to challenge it. To look for nuance, to try to figure out what part of that narrative, or any others, sits well with my mind and my spirit.
Here we are encouraged to deconstruct God and faith, to see what does and doesn’t speak to our soul and intellect.
Stated in a clumsy and over simplified way, Jacques Derrida encourages us to invite a little chaos into the order of our universe. One of his challenges to us is to consider the idea that there is no Ground Zero for common experience.
By this, he means that no one person has the exact same experience as any other. On the surface one can easily agree, but the problem appears when you then try to craft a collective narrative.
Going back to Genesis for a moment, the story about Abraham, Isaac, the ram and God; each of these beings has their own version of the events that took place, how they felt and what the ramifications of that moment brought into their own life.
Derrida says that these differences are so profound that a common narrative can’t be created.
But we are a species who’s very development has relied on narrative story.
Let’s step back a little bit from Derrida and reconsider faith.
Certainly few, if any people, in this room consider the text of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim texts to be the absolute, true word of God.
In a sense, we are already sort of practiced at considering and rejecting the most common of narratives about religion.
After all, we are here.
Sitting together, atheist, Christian, agnostic, pagan and more.
What would it be like if you could completely let go of the collective narrative of what God and Faith mean, and re-discover what they mean to you?
What if you could divorce the idea of Faith from big-box churches, from churches who rhythmically chant anti-gay slogans, or who wish to keep “women in their place”?
Can you imagine a deeply lived faith that frees you? That encourages you to live boldly in concert with your highest ideals?
Follow Jacques Derrida’s thinking and release yourself from the anchor of the common, the falsely collective narrative and into your own fully realized version of reality.
For centuries faith was inspired by, lived and enforced by fear. Fear of the night, fear of the stranger, fear of an angry God, fear of Hell.
We do not need to drag these fears along with us any longer.
As John Caputo said in the interview that Amy read earlier,
“I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth.
There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god-under-denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?... If you cease to “believe” in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you will require new propositions.
Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on.
But if you lose “faith,” in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.”
As religious people, a non-creedal people who require no allegiance to a singular doctrine, we have the freedom and the duty to cease believing that which we do not or cannot find to be true.
We can arrive, with intellectual honesty and spiritual purity, at places like atheism, or agnosticism, or panentheism, or Christianity, or Buddhism or any combination of these and more. What matters more than where you land, is that you jump into the sometimes disquieting process of examination.
That you let go of the anchor we have always known, the default, the “give me that old time religion,” theology that no longer carries a deep meaning for us.
It is also important, I might add, that we do not engage in this practice once, say when were in college, and then sit for the next 50 years, secure in the knowledge that we have figured it all out.
At 46 I know that I have not figured it all out, and therefor I can say with some certainty that when I was at university, I didn’t have it all figured out, either.
It’s true, we get busy with life. With demanding jobs, partners, children, keeping up our homes and our laundry. The mind reels sometimes at all that must be done.
Let me add one more, never ending task to your list.
Examine your faith.
Do not be afraid to explode it out, and look at all the parts. To examine it’s nooks and it’s crannies to find both gems there and things to discard.
I will admit that some of post-modernism is to me a little bit scary and a little bit annoying. I was happy being a modern person. I didn’t have any desire to go post anything.
I like the security of having a common narrative. And even though I don’t enjoy having to strike out on my own, understanding that my experience is utterly different from everyone else’s…
truth be told it feels a little lonely sometimes…
I am up here encouraging you to do the same.
In your own way, of course, guided by your own fence posts and markers.
Our goal is to find that which is the truest to us. To arrive at an understanding that was reached in a process steeped in integrity.
To let go of the old, the tried the true, and try them again.
Some may fit, some may not. Undoubtedly, you can be surprised by what you discover about yourself and the world around you.
If our goal is to live deeply and authentically in our truth, then we must invest some time into finding out what is true…for us.
When we have invested time and energy in this pursuit, we will find people around us who’s own truth with intersect with our own.
Perhaps, likely, it won’t be a point for point match with our journey, but we will cross paths now and again, and when we do, it affords us to look at each other with admiration and acknowledge the work we’ve both done, and celebrate our commonalities.
Let go of that image of God you’ve been carrying with you since you were six. Cease letting that image have power over you, either in your obedience or resistance to that image.
Recently, I came across this poster. I took this photo with my phone, so please accept my apologies about the image’s quality.
The image is of 5 boys, about aged 11 or 12. Each of them is wearing a football outfit, complete with pads and helmets.
Also in the picture is a violin case, and one of the boys has taken the violin from its case and is playing it for the other boys.
The caption reads “Celebrate the Whole Boy.”
What this image demonstrates is literally a game changer.
This photo is clearly playing on stereotypes of masculinity. But instead of asking a question like “Is there a conflict between what a young man is supposed to be and what this young man appears to be?” the photo evokes questions like “Why is there a conflict between the two?”
“Why must gender stereotypes rule our lives?”
“Why is making beauty wrong or unmasculine?”
If we change the questions, we get whole new meanings from our lives.
Take your religious journey, your faith—ask new questions of it.
May wondrous discoveries of new answers be yours.
© Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to:
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 14, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment