"Who Isn’t It?" - the Reverend Alison Hyder
February 3, 2002 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown
Opening Words:
Ours
is a faith taught by no priest,
But by our beating hearts;
Faith to each other:
the fidelity of people whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
Nay, in the silent bodily presence, feel
The mystic stirrings of a common life
That makes the many one.
Prayer: the Maori version of the Lord’s Prayer [from the
Book of Common Prayer of New Zealand]
Eternal
Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God in whom is heaven:
The Hallowing of your name echoes through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the earth!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth!
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever.
Amen.
Reading by Kabir [The Kabir Book: Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, trans. by Robert Bly]
I don’t know what sort of a God we have been talking about.
The caller calls in a loud voice to the Holy One at dusk.
Why? Surely
the Holy One is not deaf.
He hears the delicate anklets that ring on the feet of an insect as it
walks.
Go over
and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead,
weave your hair matted, long, and ostentatious,
but when deep inside you is a loaded gun,
how can you have God?
SERMON: “Who Isn’t It?” - Rev. Alison Hyder
The second of the Ten Commandments tells us not to make images of God.
It warns us not to make idols of anything around us on earth, and bow
down to them, because that is not God. God, the commandment implies, is
larger and deeper and more mysterious than anything that human beings
can see or touch or dream.
It’s pretty good advice, because we mortals tend to be pretty concrete
and linear in our thinking. We get a concept early on and we tend to stick
with it. But then, when we outgrow the concept, when our old idea of God
no longer works for us, we say we’ve lost our faith; that we no
longer believe in God. But in fact, it is our own concept that we have
rejected. And that may be a very good thing.
I think most of you are familiar with the joke where a man goes to his
doctor and says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this” (he contorts
himself into some weird position). And the doctor says, “Then don’t
do that.”
Well, of course, we laugh, but we do things that hurt us all the time,
silly and unnecessary things: We drink too much, drive dangerously, pick
fights, get tattooed. We try to punish ourselves. We take calculated risks,
or balance the danger with the benefits we will gain. After all, we don’t
want to stagnate. Life is about taking a chance.
But sometimes the pain is telling us something. It is a warning to change
our behavior for the sake of our own health and potential. Maybe, just
maybe, you aren’t supposed to be a blonde. That burning sensation
all over your head could be a clue.
But what if the pain goes deeper? What if we are being damaged by our
very beliefs? What if your faith is doing you more harm than good? You
may have a God who doesn’t like you.
Let me take a little poll. How many of you were raised in a religious
home of some sort? How many of you were raised Catholic? How many in Jewish
homes? Who attended a Protestant church? Unitarian/Universalist? Anything
else? Remember what you were taught about God?
When we’re little, the whole world is mysterious and magical. Everyone
has more power than we do. Our friends and siblings can make us feel sad
or hurt or get us into trouble. Our parents protect and nurture us, but
they also get angry and cold and distracted. Other adults have authority
and special knowledge. Even animals have special skills and a confidence
we lack. We live in a strange and unpredictable world.
But, children are so often taught, there is a God who sees and understands
everything, who knows what is in your heart and hears your prayers. He
watches you when you steal the loose change from your parents’ coats.
He has the power to punish you when you are bad. With one wave of his
hand he can part the waters. He could even pick up your house and move
it to the middle of Yankee Stadium if he wanted do, but he has more important
things to do, like getting reports from angels and deciding where to put
the people who’ve died, and making sure the President is okay. Because
he’s in charge of the whole universe, and he loves us.
Except that very often it doesn’t feel like he loves us. Like, what
if our brother gets really really sick? He never did anything so very
bad, so why is he being punished? Maybe it’s our fault. What about
all the poor people, or the children in Northern Ireland or Ethiopia or
the little heathen children who never get to learn about God and are damned
to go to hell? Why doesn’t God fix it? It doesn’t make sense.
And then we begin to lose hope. If God can’t make things better
–or won’t - how can we? We become convinced of our own impotence.
Many ministers preach that God is stern and judgmental. He considers us
to be loathsome sinners, and he let his own son suffer to save our miserable
souls. So he gets really angry if we misbehave or show any kind of ingratitude.
We have to placate God all the time or he will punish us for our indiscretions,
sending us diseases and poverty and terrorists in planes. Most people
will go to hell, but a few souls will be saved and that makes it worth
all the suffering and fear in God’s book.
Muslims have 99 names for God. The Enduring. The Watcher. The Generous.
The Deferrer. God is Killer and Patron, Hidden and Prevailing, the Just
and the Destroyer. Hindus have many manifestations of God, of both and
no genders, many colors and moods.
But in
our culture we’re told that God is our Father.
So what was your father like? Strong? Fun and irresponsible? Sweet and
kind? Remote and inaccessible? Smart? Tired?
What if your father was abusive? A man named Bill wrote that when he was
a little boy he would pray repeatedly to God to save him from the anger
of his father. His father was an alcoholic and would come home from drinking
and make his rounds through the house verbally and sometimes physically
abusing each of his sisters, his mother, and him. Bill remembers that
he would tremble in his room in terror at the sound of his father stalking
through the house. He would pray to God with all his might for protection,
and still his father would burst into the room and the nightmare would
continue. He left as soon as he was old enough to go; his mother and sisters
escaped a year later.
So where was God? Why didn’t he protect Bill from his father? Or
was God on his father’s side? Sure seemed like it. Most children,
in that kind of situation, take the blame upon themselves. Maybe you did
at one time. “I must be a bad person,” you thought, “or
God wouldn’t be punishing me.” And you internalize guilt and
shame that you carry with you forever.
Unitarian Universalist professor Rev. William R Jones struggles with this
situation in his book, Is God a White Racist?, which he wrote as a challenge
to other Black theologians. First published in 1973, Jones asks why African
Americans consider God to be benevolent and good when as a group Blacks
have suffered disproportionately for over 400 years. Why doesn’t
God intervene? Are Black people being punished for the sins of their fathers?
Have they been chosen for some greater purpose whose reward is in heaven?
Or is God in fact on the side of the oppressors?
Is God a White Racist, willing our subjection? Jones asks. Or is it instead
our religion that is at fault, the brand of Christianity that was used
to keep slaves obedient and hopeful, that sanctifies submission with promises
of heaven? Blacks have internalized a faith that tells them that suffering
is noble and holy. But whose God are we serving? Blacks will never truly
have a theology of liberation, Jones tells his colleagues, until we are
willing to reject the beliefs that keep us in emotional and social bondage.
We need a God who empowers us, he says, not one who placates us.
Alice Walker concurs. “It is fatal to love a God who does not love
you,” she tells us, “a God specifically created to comfort,
lead advise, strengthen and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else.
We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctified our destruction....
All people deserve to worship a God who also worships them. A God that
made them, and likes them… Everyone deserves a God who adores our
freedom: Nature would never advise us to be anything but ourselves.”
[“Anything We Love Can Be Saved”]
For far too long, we have been sold a limited God, a God of wrath and
condemnation, a petty and arbitrary and silent God. One who was made in
the image of someone else, who serves other needs and not our own. We
have been given a false idol and told to bow down. Many of you are here
for that very reason. Because you were unable to find yourself in the
God of your childhood. You were made to feel inadequate or ashamed. You
lost faith, and you lost heart.
Who is the God you don’t believe in? Or maybe I should ask, who
is the God you shouldn’t believe in? The God who tells you you’re
dirty, guilty, inadequate, wrong; that something inside of you is unacceptable
and bad? That convinces you to hate anything that is different? “When
deep inside you there is a loaded gun,” Kabir asks, “how can
you have God?” Fear is a dangerous faith. We’ve seen that
again and again.
Researcher Kenneth Pargament of Bowling Green State University did a study
of health and religion, and notes,
“….there are certain types of religious expression that seem
to be helpful and certain types that seem to be harmful.” In several
studies involving hundreds of subjects he has found that people who embrace
what could be called “the sinners in the hands of an angry God”
model …have poorer mental health outcomes. People who feel hostility
toward God, believe they’re being punished for their sins or perceive
a lack of emotional support from their church or synagogue typically suffer
more distress, anxiety and depression. By contrast, people who embrace
the “loving God” model see God as a partner who works with
them to resolve problems. They view difficult situations as opportunities
for spiritual growth. … The result? They enjoy more positive mental
health outcomes, Pargament says. [The Physics of Christmas, by Roger Highfield,
p. 266-7]
It is
hard enough to change our behavior, but changing our thoughts can challenge
us at our very foundations and threaten everything we stand for. Many
people would rather constrain and limit and stifle themselves than lose
that feeling of certainty. It is easier to hate yourself than to lose
God. It strikes at the heart of all you have been taught to trust and
arouses feelings of abandonment and fear and shame. But it is a necessary
part of faith to differentiate between what we’ve been taught and
what we have learned. The first comes from the outside, and the second
arises from within, from the truth of your own heart and mind and personal,
physical experience.
My colleague Rev. Doug Wadkins says “I would pray with all of my
heart as a young teen that I would not be gay. I had been told repeatedly
that homosexuals would go to hell and that God answered prayers. I wondered
why God would not take these feelings away. Why would God want a twelve-year-old
boy to burn in hell? I assumed that there must be something very wrong
with me and my prayers; but then I decided that the problem was what I
had been taught about myself and about God.” Raised in a narrower
faith, Doug eventually found in Unitarian Universalism a faith that affirmed
all of him.
This makes it sound easy, but I’m sure that Doug, like many of you,
had to go through years of anguish, of doubt and secrecy and shame before
he could accept himself as loved by God. He didn’t change only himself.
He had to change his God too, before he could find that freedom and that
peace.
You may find God through silence, or by helping others, making art or
making love. Like Alice Walker, you may find it in Mother Earth, or by
honoring the Goddess, or surrendering to a higher power. You may even
find God here, in the touch of someone’s hand, or some rare moment
of peace or insight, little bits and pieces of a new assurance or joy
or doubt. God may flay you like an onion, revealing hot, raw, blistering
layers of truth. But they must be your own truth, however lurid and odd
you think they seem. Believe me, God is a whole lot bigger and stranger
than you could ever be. And a lot more fabulous, too.
Paul Tillich, the great Christian theologian wrote “The name of
[the] infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God.
That is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning
for you [or, I would add, too much] translate it and speak out of the
depths of your life, out of the source of your being, of your ultimate
concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps in
order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned
about God, perhaps even that word itself.”
What if you were to spend the rest of the day calling everything God?
To yourself, at least. The chair that supports you. The bagel that nourishes
you. The shopkeeper, and the seagull, white feathers fluttering, dead
on the beach. The sky – that’s easier – and the pain
in your leg or your hands, and that memory from high school. Feelings
of hatred and curiosity and boredom. All God.
This is your job as Unitarian Universalists: To reason, and affirm, and
to doubt. Walk around, and find your own 99 names for God.
No, you’d say to yourself, that waiter is definitely not God, at
least not today, and not that hideous coat she’s wearing. I can
sort of learn something from slipping on the ice. But what’s good
about razor burn, or Mussolini, or oil slicks?
Well, maybe nothing. But how do you know until you really, truly ask yourself?
What is it that you love? Which aspects of God make you small and which
set you free to dream, and strive, and dare? Who is God, and who isn’t
it?
Somewhere within you, you will know.
CLOSING WORDS: from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass”
“I’ll
believe in one God,
I’ll believe in three.
I’ll believe in thirty, if they’ll believe in me.”
